Caitlin Clark has taken the basketball world by storm.
But there’s still a lot that fans don’t know about this superstar.
And Caitlin Clark revealed one secret about her past that shocked Travis Kelce.
Caitlin Clark was on the radar of colleges at a young age
Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark has created an unprecedented interest in the WNBA and women’s basketball.
Her rise to fame began playing for the University of Iowa Hawkeyes women’s team where she set the NCAA scoring records.
Clark revealed that she got interest from colleges before she entered high school during an appearance on the New Heights podcast hosted by Travis and Jason Kelce.
She got her first letter from a college recruiting her to play basketball when she was in the seventh grade.
The former Iowa star said she was glad her parents helped her navigate the recruiting process.
“It’s honestly sad, like where college recruitment has kind of gone, it’s just insane,” Clark explained. “I feel very fortunate. My parents were just like, they told my older brother, ‘Go get the mail, like we don’t want your sister to see that.’ They wanted me to be in seventh grade and enjoy middle school and like hang out with your friends like you shouldn’t be worrying about where you’re going to college.”
Clark wasn’t thinking about college basketball when she was still in middle school.
“Seventh grade was wild, and I was playing up two years, so I was playing with high schoolers, but yeah, I didn’t really like to think anything of it,” Clark said. “I was just going out there and hooping and having fun. It’s kind of just what came with it.”
Clark’s parents played a key role in her rise to superstardom
Clark played high school basketball and during the summer on the AAU circuit.
Her parents kept her from getting burnt out on basketball growing up.
“I played AAU, and then I played for my high school team, but my mom would be like, ‘She is not playing more than like three games or two games in one day, like that’s crazy,’ because sometimes they would want me to play for the seventh-grade team and the eighth-grade team,” Clark stated. “So, my parents were really good about that like they didn’t want me to lose the love of it, like you don’t want to get burned out, you still want to be having fun when you’re doing it as a pro if you’re lucky enough.”
She didn’t agree with the decision at the time, but in hindsight, she admitted that it was the best thing for her career.
“And, maybe, as a kid, I was like, ‘Mom, no, like I can keep going, like I can keep playing,’ but looking back, I’m very fortunate for that, because I haven’t lost that fun of it and that passion for it and always wanting to get better and sometimes that’s why people get burned out,” Clark said. “It is because they did it too much as a kid and their parents forced it on them or whoever forced it on them too much and that was never something I really had to deal with, so feel very fortunate.”
She didn’t start visiting colleges until her freshman year of high school and didn’t commit to Iowa until she was a senior.
