BALTIMORE — Charlotte North can empathize with Caitlin Clark.
As Clark did in women’s basketball at Iowa this past winter, North set several NCAA Division I records in women’s lacrosse at Boston College and captured the imagination of many young players before joining the Athletes Unlimited professional league in 2022. In many circles, she was regarded — and still is — as a pioneer who could ignite unprecedented interest in lacrosse.
So North has an understanding of what Clark has undertaken in her debut with the WNBA this summer as perhaps the most popular athlete in women’s sports.
“She is quite an amazing athlete and competitor with what she’s been able to do and shoulder under pressure to perform day in and day out and also be a role model with all eyes on her every moment,” North said. “That’s really remarkable. It’s something that inspires me.”
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North was one of four Athletes Unlimited players who spoke Thursday at USA Lacrosse headquarters in Sparks before the start of the league’s fourth season, which began Thursday and ends Aug. 11. The league’s model imitates fantasy sports leagues by ranking players according to their individual and team performances and changing lineups every week.
As has occurred in many conversations, sports bars and talk shows, the phenomenon of Clark, former St. Frances star Angel Reese, a Randallstown native who began her college career at Maryland before transferring to LSU, and the WNBA became a subject Thursday. Many lacrosse players embraced the discussion.
“It’s been a long time coming for women’s sports, and Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and all of the WNBA and [National Women’s Soccer League] players who have really taken on that burden of elevating women’s sports for the better are only going to make lacrosse grow,” said Sydni Black, a former attacker for Loyola Maryland. “This is one of the most exciting sports in the entire world, and once you see it, you can recognize it yourself.”
Added former Northwestern attacker Izzy Scane: “To see women’s sports specifically hit the big stage of social media and be part of the public eye is a really cool thing to see because if that can happen in a sport like women’s basketball, it can happen in any sport, and we’re just kind of getting the by-product of that and continuing to grow women’s sports to the next level.”
Clark and Reese have sparked tremendous interest in women’s basketball. After the first month of the season, the WNBA said that games on various television and streaming platforms averaged 1.32 million viewers compared with 462,000 a year ago.
As of July 5, 11 WNBA games had drawn more than 1 million viewers, which is the highest number for the league since 2002. And the third meeting between Clark’s Indiana Fever and Reese’s Chicago Sky on June 23 averaged 2.3 million viewers on ESPN, becoming the most-watched WNBA game in parent company Disney’s history.
While pointing out the news value behind the emerging rivalry between Clark and Reese — which started in the 2023 NCAA Tournament when Reese and the Tigers beat Clark and the Hawkeyes in the championship game — Morgan State multimedia journalism professor Milton Kent said the duo has proven their staying power.
“If you’re marketing women’s sports, one of the positive things is that these women aren’t going anywhere,” said Kent, a former Evening Sun sports writer who is also an advisor to Morgan State’s campus online newspaper The Spokesman. “It’s not one-and-done. They’re going to be here because of the way colleges are structured, they had to stay there for four years. So you see them for a length of time, and you get to know them.”
Whether the Clark-Reese effect spills over to Athletes Unlimited remains to be seen, but women’s sports has pushed the envelope in the past year. In August, Nebraska volleyball hosted Omaha at the football team’s Memorial Stadium before 92,003 people, the largest-attended women’s sports event in the United States.
In January, the women’s hockey Beanpot tournament sold out TD Garden in Boston for the first time. And Kansas City is building the first soccer-specific stadium for its NWSL franchise, the Current.
Interest in Athletes Unlimited is growing, too. Abi Jackson, Director of Sport for Lacrosse, said between the 2022 and 2023 seasons, ticket sales, content engagement and viewership numbers at least doubled and that the league’s social media platforms have experienced more consistent engagement since the end of the 2023 season.
Those who can’t attend games can find them on television. ESPN will air 14 of the league’s 24 games on its family of networks, while Bally Sports will broadcast or stream the remaining 10. Former Boston College attacker Sam Apuzzo said that outreach is critical to the league, which is eyeing a return to the Olympics in 2028 in Los Angeles for the first time since 1948.
“Being able to be on linear and being visible to everyone, that’s only going to help us, and it’s going to allow our girls to speak for themselves,” she said. “Hopefully, people latch onto it and get excited about it.”
Does Athletes Unlimited need a transformative figure like Clark has become for the WNBA? Former North Carolina goalkeeper Taylor Moreno argued that the league already has two catalysts in North, who graduated as the NCAA Division I leader in career goals with 358, and Scane, who broke North’s record with 376. On Thursday night, Scane fell short of overtaking Clark as best college female athlete at the ESPY Awards.
“We’re so fortunate to have Charlotte North and Izzy Scane and those guys who can come in here and really utilize their platform to help grow the sport and create more awareness of the sport,” Moreno said. “For our sport as a whole, Izzy is a great representation of what our sport is all about, and I’m so happy for her and all of the success she had in college. I hope that can continue into this league because it’s really important for those guys to be the face of women’s lacrosse. If you want to call them our Caitlin Clarks, I think that would be pretty accurate.”
