Swish Appeal is thrilled to share an excerpt from contributor Łukasz Muniowski’s forthcoming book, The Caitlin Clark Effect: Women’s Basketball and the Rise of a Transformational Star, which will be released on Aug. 31 by McFarland Books and is now available for pre-order.
Łukasz’s book focuses on the interplay between Caitlin Clark’s athletic talent and the evolving landscape of the sport, examining Clark’s unprecedented rise in context with an expanding media environment, the politics of race, the dynamics of college athletics, changing basketball styles and more in order to offer a full exploration of Clark’s impact on women’s basketball, and vice versa.
This excerpt provides insight into how the Belmont Bruins, one of the most successful mid-major programs in women’s college basketball, experienced the Caitlin Clark Effect. (And, here’s a look back at Zachary Draves’ contemporaneous account of the Iowa-Belmont game.)
On November 20, 2022, the Belmont Bruins arrived in Iowa City to face the Hawkeyes in Carver–Hawkeye Arena. The home team was coming off a one-point loss at Kansas State just three days earlier, so understandably it was a little ticked off when facing a team from the less-prestigious Missouri Valley Conference. It was one of those early-season, hastily-organized games.
I asked Bruins head coach Bart Brooks, who had been at the helm of the Belmont University women’s basketball program since April 2017, how it felt to get overlooked by potential recruits, other schools and the national media: “It’s just a part of probably every program on our level, regardless of being on the men’s side or women’s side. We’re fighting an uphill battle right now. We’re fighting to get coverage. We’re fighting to get respect. We’re fighting to get opportunities to play.”
“ln 2025 we were the seventh conference in the country. I really don’t think that we’re that far off, especially when there’s—what?—32 different leagues here in the United States,” added fellow MVC coach Allison Pohlman of Drake. “We’re the top-tier mid-major conference, one that other schools ultimately want to schedule and play, because of the tenacity and the grit that our teams are able to exude.”
Coach Brooks said that the only way for his school to get national exposure was to perform against more established programs, while remaining flawless in the conference games: “For schools like us, our conference is really challenging. It’s really hard. The teams are really good, the coaches are really good, the players are really good, but we don’t get the credit for winning those games like schools from the bigger conferences get credit for winning their games. That’s why we have to be really good in November and December in our non-conference games. We have to beat teams from larger conferences.”
However, even organizing those games is a challenge. The conference games are already scheduled for the schools by the conferences, which leaves around 11 contests to be handled by coaches. They not only have to find a team willing to play their school—the dates and the locations have to work too. Teams like Iowa have the money to pay teams for adjusting to their schedules. This allows big programs to organize what are referred to as “guarantee games,” which means that Iowa pays a team like Belmont to come to their arena and play, without having to go to Nashville for a rematch a year later.
Coach Brooks and his players understood that they needed to make the most of the opportunity. Brooks’ whole coaching career has been about maximizing whatever opportunities come his way. Reminiscing about his playing career, which concluded at North Dakota, Brooks described himself as “not very good, but good enough to play a little bit.” As an undergraduate student at the University of Wyoming, Brooks wanted to get into coaching, but the men’s basketball staff was not in need of an intern. Luckily for him, women’s head coach Joe Legerski was. “And I actually fell in love with it. I loved how they ran their program. I loved how hard the players worked.” After a year-long internship, Brooks worked for two years as an assistant coach at Barry University in Miami before joining the staff of the DePaul Blue Demons, where he would work for the next 11 years. “I just was in the right place at the right time with the right people,” said Brooks, explaining the road to his first head coaching job.
The game against Iowa was one of the more high-profile of his career. His gameplan was to allow Clark to play her game and defend other players instead: “She’s such a good player, we were hoping that we could get ourselves into a position to at least be in the game late if we controlled the other guys. We just felt like we were going to do everything we could to make her shots hard. Obviously we picked her up a lot earlier than everyone else because of her range and her ability to shoot from long distance. And we felt really good about being able to slow the other guys down and make them less efficient.”
The player tasked with guarding Caitlin was Tuti Jones, who Coach Brooks referred to as one of the best defenders he ever coached. At half time the game was close, with the Bruins down by seven thanks in large part to Jones, who found herself looking for a new pair of shoes during the halftime break.
“She actually ran out of a pair of her shoes; they broke in the middle. The sole of Jones’ shoe had fallen off after running after Caitlin,” said Brooks. Jones got a pair of shoes from a teammate who barely played. And while she continued running after Caitlin, she failed to stop her. Nobody could on that day. “She was in another realm of confidence,” explained Brooks. In the end, his team lost by 11 points, with Caitlin scoring 33 points and converting three of seven three-point attempts.