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Caitlin Clark broke the NCAA women’s basketball scoring record two weeks ago, but it wasn’t until Wednesday that she became the all-time leading scorer among college basketball players.
The Iowa star passed Lynette Woodard’s 3,649 career points with Kansas, erasing a significant asterisk on the NCAA’s all-time scoring list. She also fell just 18 points shy of breaking Pete Maravich’s mark of 3,667 for the NCAA scoring record among men and women.
Averaging more than 30 points per game, Clark is on pace to surpass Maravich in their next game, Iowa’s regular-season finale against No. 2 Ohio State on Sunday.
Minutes before passing to Woodard, Clark set another official NCAA record, hitting his 155th 3-pointer of the season to break the single-season mark previously held by Idaho’s Taylor Pierce in 2019.
The performance was part of a triple-double with 33 points, 12 assists and 10 rebounds for Clark in Iowa’s 108-60 victory over Minnesota. He entered the game needing 32 points to match Woodard and reached almost the halfway point in four minutes.
Woodard scored her points between 1977 and 1981, a time when women’s college basketball was governed by the Association of Women’s Intercollegiate Athletics. The NCAA did not officially sanction women’s college basketball until 1982 and does not recognize any players or statistics prior to that year.
So for decades, Woodard ranked above all college basketball players, but she was not recognized as the all-time leading scorer. As one historical observer told Eden Laase of Yahoo Sports:
“When you don’t know the creators of the story, you mislead them and the current players,” said Elizabeth Galloway-Mcquitter. “One of the greats of our game is constantly kept in the shadows. And I imagine Caitlin (Clark) would want to know what record he is really chasing.”
Clark has finally put that discrepancy to rest in the record book, with much more to do in the final games of her Iowa career (assuming she doesn’t spurn the WNBA for a fifth year of college baseball).
The remainder of Clark’s season consists of the Hawkeyes’ game against Ohio State, the Big Ten Tournament and the NCAA tournament. With Iowa currently sitting in third place in the Big Ten and on track for a double bye in the conference tournament, that leaves up to 10 games for Clark to play.