I saw a nine-year-old girl holding a sign at an Iowa women’s basketball game recently that said it all: “I used to dance but now I play basketball.”

This is the year that women’s basketball comes of age. And it’s been a long time coming from the days when my sisters were limited to half court play so they didn’t overexert themselves and actually sweat.

Women’s basketball has long fought for respect and mainstream recognition, but not anymore. This may be the year more people pay attention to the women’s NCAA tournament than the men’s. 

The biggest stars of March Madness are arguably women rather than men in 2024: Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Paige Bueckers, and Juju Watkins. After many years of treatment as second-class citizens, women are now surpassing men in popularity and earning potential. 

I give Iowa’s Caitlin Clark much of the credit for the breakthrough. A few games ago, she became the all-time leading scorer in the history of NCAA basketball — men’s and women’s — surpassing Pete Maravich’s 3667 points.

Her three-point sharpshooting, spellbinding passes and ball-handling wizardry have made women’s college basketball one of the most exciting sporting events to watch in the last year, period.

• Before the 2023-24 season even officially started, Iowa broke the women’s basketball all-time attendance record for a single game with 55,646 during an exhibition against DePaul in Kinnick Stadium, home to Iowa’s football team.

• Last year’s championship game boasted a sellout crowd of 19,482 and a mind-blowing 9.9 million viewers from home, topping viewership from the previous year by 100 percent. This year, tickets for the women’s Final Four are going for twice as much as the men’s.

• Deloitte forecasts that in 2024, for the first time, women’s elite sports will generate more than $1 billion in revenue — a 300% increase on the industry’s evaluation in 2021.

The great equalizer

Women’s basketball actually has a long history, much of it difficult. In fact, women have been hooping longer than they have been allowed to vote.

Just a year after James Naismith invented the game in 1891, Senda Berenson, the physical culture director at Smith College, read an article by Naismith and thought the game would be a good fit for Smith. Berenson was concerned that women’s “frailty” and poor health would mean lower wages than men at a time when women were beginning to enter the workforce. She brought basketball to Smith to help the students improve their stamina and physical ability. She brought basketball to Smith to help make women equal to men. 

She adapted the rules to accord with the standards of “proper” women at the time. To ensure ladylike behavior, Berenson forbade snatching the ball, holding it for more than three seconds, or dribbling it more than three times. In this way, Berenson hoped to prevent lady hoopsters from developing “dangerous nervous tendencies and losing the grace and dignity and self respect we would all have her foster.”

She hung two wastebaskets from the ceiling and unleashed bloomers-clad freshmen and juniors against sophomores and seniors with 800 wildly cheering women watching. It was an instant hit. 

Barely 11 months later, the first official game between two women’s collegiate teams took place when Stanford played Berkeley, and it was dogged immediately by controversy. Mabel Craft, a journalist covering the game for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote this:

“[Basketball] wasn’t invented for girls, and there isn’t anything effeminate about it … It was made for men to play indoors and it is a game that would send the physician who thinks the feminine organization ‘so delicate,’ into the hysterics he tries so hard to perpetuate.”

The great sports columnist Sally Jenkins had this to say about some of those early games:

“Games would end with handkerchiefs and hair pins scattered all over gymnasium floors. One article in the Los Angeles Times had a headline that said: ‘Sweet Things Have Scrap.’ It went on to furnish details of a high school game that included a lot of hair-pulling, tumbling and sliding. The reporter wrote: ‘There was something disquieting in the grim and murderous determinations with which the young ladies chased each other all over the court.’

“This masculine behavior was so scandalous a development that parents forbade their daughters to participate,” Jenkins wrote, “and medical doctors and physical education instructors wrote long worried studies about the psychological and physical effects of the sport, calling for it to be abolished. But let me just say for the record that a good game of basketball never put me in as grim and murderous a mood as a patch of needlework did. Ah, yes. my sisters.”

Turns out, women could be just as competitive as men. Shocking! Turns out, women could be both fierce and feminine.

Comparing then with now

We have come a long way since those early days. ESPN paid $65 million for the right to broadcast the NCAA women’s tournament this year, more than triple the value of the previous agreement. 

Now we have NBA legends unequivocally singing Caitlin’s praises on national TV. “I’m gonna go on the record and say she’s the best female collegiate player ever,” Shaquille O’Neal said on “Inside the NBA.”

First lady Jill Biden and women’s sports icon Billie Jean King attended the 2023 championship game in Dallas.

At a Super Bowl press conference, the biggest star in the NFL, Patrick Mahomes, took some time to heap laurels on Caitlin Clark:

“You can tell she loves the game. She loves playing at Iowa. … She’s one of the best college basketball players to ever play. (She will) go to the WNBA and dominate there, as well. Hopefully, I never have to play her 1-on-1 because she’ll for sure be getting buckets on me.”

Ironically, one of the surest signs of progress in how the sport is viewed and played is a fiery brawl that broke out last week between South Carolina and LSU during the SEC Women’s Tournament championship game.

With just over two minutes remaining, South Carolina’s MiLaysia Fulwiley stole the ball from LSU guard Flau’jae Johnson, and Johnson responded by grabbing her out of frustration to stop the fast break. Multiple players from South Carolina came to their teammate’s aid, including Ashlyn Watkins, whom Johnson shoved away.

South Carolina center Kamilla Cardoso then decked Johnson in response, and both benches cleared.

The game was delayed for 20 minutes while officials figured out what happened. Since NCAA rules do not allow players to leave the bench, everyone who did so was automatically ejected.

The game eventually continued, and once the final buzzer went off, South Carolina had won. But the players who were ejected were not allowed to join their team in its SEC championship celebration.

South Carolina coach Dawn Staley apologized for the brawl during her postgame interview and said it was not a good reflection of women’s basketball in 2024.

“I just don’t want people who are tuning into women’s basketball to think that is our game, because it isn’t. Our game is a really beautiful thing, and to be quite honest, this is a part of it now. So we have to fix it, and we have to move on.”

Turns out after all these years, women are actually human, and it may be that they are being treated as humans now, too. They are being treated just like guys are treated. 

I think Senda Berenson might find that news inspiring.