Extraordinary Ohio State Women’s Basketball Season Highlights a Watershed Sports Moment

My sons’ favorite athletes right now are Lionel Messi and every member of the Ohio State women’s basketball team. When it comes to hoops, they know nothing about Nikola Jokic or Kevin Durant—they know LeBron’s name only because we’re all from Northeast Ohio and, well, Northeast Ohioans root for LeBron. 

No, in our house, it’s Jacy Sheldon, Cotie McMahon, Celeste Taylor. They know Caitlin Clark—how could they not? But with much respect, she’s ancillary. My 7-year-old spent the basketball season rooting exclusively for Ohio State’s Rikki Harris when she was on the court. He begged and begged for her jersey; I told him to put it on his birthday wish list. (Even though Harris entered the transfer portal in April, I have no doubt my kiddo will root for her no matter where she lands.) 

And why shouldn’t their favorites be this team, these women? 

It’s an electrifying time to be a women’s basketball fan. I’m writing this on April 2, and the Buckeyes are—sadly—long out of the NCAA women’s tournament. But on April 1, my family watched Clark’s Iowa team play Angel Reese’s LSU on ESPN, along with 12.3 million other people, more than the viewership of any other NCAA basketball game on ESPN, ever. ESPN reported in early April that women’s NCAA Final Four tickets were selling for double the price of men’s, averaging $2,323. The women’s Big Ten tournament sold out for the first time. The Ohio State-Iowa game that closed the regular season was the highest-priced basketball ticket in NCAA women’s basketball history. 

We’re having an important, national conversation about women’s basketball. We’re pointing out the disparity in how professional women’s basketball players are paid as compared to NBA athletes. We’re recognizing that women can and should get big endorsement contracts. We’re talking about the fact that, until 2022, the women’s NCAA basketball tournament was not permitted to use the phrase “March Madness.” We’re considering who is allowed to show they are competitive, and who gets slapped on the wrist for it.  

And we’re remembering players like Lynette Woodard, who scored 3,649 points playing at the University of Kansas in the late ‘70s and early ’80s, and Pearl Moore, who scored 4,061 at Francis Marion, a tiny school in South Carolina, in the late ’70s. Woodard and Moore, both Black, were largely overlooked and forgotten until Clark made her run at “Pistol” Pete Maravich’s NCAA scoring record. (He scored 3,667; Clark finished her college career with 3,951 points.)  

The national focus is on Clark, and we can debate whether it should be. (Just know I’ll come down on the side of “it should, but we should also talk about Paige Bueckers at UConn and everyone at South Carolina and JuJu Watkins at USC and a whole bunch of others.)  

My family was lucky enough to attend a handful of Ohio State women’s games this year and to watch a few on TV. We’ve used those experiences to talk about hard work (in my mind, there’s no better conditioned team than the Ohio State women’s basketball team—if you’ve seen their full-court press, you know), about practice (they’ve obviously been working on free throws), about teamwork (this team loves to watch one another score.) 

We’ve talked about family—Jacy Sheldon’s sister, Emmy, hugging and high-fiving before and after games; Cotie McMahon’s mom cheering from her seat. We’ve talked about coachability, about owning your mistakes and successes, and gone back to Ohio State coach Kevin McGuff’s Twitter-I-mean-X feed for inspiration. McGuff’s lessons have motivated my second-grade son to work harder at drills for his current favorite sport, soccer, even when he might not feel like practicing. 

We’ve sung along with the band, making the O-H-I-O with our arms, and we’ve talked about home, about pride, about taking care of yourself and the places and people around you. We’ve stood before the Jesse Owens statue as we walked to our car and talked about the ways in which the world’s opportunities have not been equal for all. 

One of the best things about this season, though, is that the kids in my life—my sons, my nieces—have gotten to witness, in person, how goals, passion and teamwork can lead to greatness. When the Iowa Hawkeyes came to Columbus, my mom, dad, brother and I took my 8-year-old niece to see the game. Clark went off, with a season-high 45 points. But McMahon and Sheldon and the rest of the Ohio State team came back from behind to win in overtime. 

I screamed so loud I almost fainted. My niece, block O painted on her cheek, cheered as loudly as anyone else in the arena. What an awesome thing for kids of any gender to see.  

Sports are not life, blasphemous as that might be to say in this city. But they do offer chances to talk about big life lessons in ways that are much more approachable than other topics. They let us focus on something that is, relative to crises around the globe, low stakes. They bring people together across generations, races, political preferences. And winning is the thing that ignites collective, bandwagon excitement. Right now, college women’s basketball is winning. (If you’re not on this particular bandwagon, what are you waiting for?) 

So, despite the tournament losses, thank you, Ohio State women’s basketball. Thank you for being fantastic examples—especially to young kids, especially to my own young boys, who benefit immensely from having female role models. Thank you for making me, a middle-aged mom, fall back in love with this sport. Thank you for working so hard, for playing with heart, for never giving up. I know you all enjoyed this season more than we did, but for me and my family, it was magic. 

This story is from the May 2024 issue of Columbus Monthly.