Indianapolis Star does it right by leaving the reporter out after the Caitlin Clark incident

After a historic NCAA tournament with record viewership, women’s soccer is in incredibly healthy shape. Demand for WNBA tickets is enormous and many teams have had to move their games to larger arenas to accommodate this unprecedented surge in popularity. The level of play in women’s football has never been higher and there are more well-known stars than ever before. We truly are living in the golden age of women’s basketball.

It’s called “The Caitlin Clark Effect” for a reason. The former Iowa Hawkeyes superstar has captured fans’ imaginations with her charisma and basketball ingenuity, and while she has yet to play a regular-season WNBA game, she has already positioned herself as the face of the sport.

As phenomenal as Clark is, her rise to superstardom has also shown us the uglier side of the sport, although it’s no fault of her own. In her opening press conference after being selected by the Indiana Fever with the first overall pick, Clark was subjected to a bizarre interaction with Indianapolis Star writer Gregg Doyel in which Doyel mimicked the “heart hands” gesture that Clark uses to communicate with her family in the city crowd and said, “Start doing it with me and we’ll get along just fine.”

Clark has only acted professionally in the face of this creepiness and idiocy, and she redeemed herself after another reporter recently asked her if her “bae” was at the game.

Yesterday it was announced that Doyel had been suspended for two weeks for his disgusting behavior at the press conference. Additionally, he was excluded from visiting Indiana Fever and will not coach the team this season. This is great news for Clark and everyone who wants to see the WNBA succeed, because with all the positive things happening for Clark and women’s sports (such as the WNBA’s announcement two days ago that the teams for the upcoming season charter flights), there should be no space for such reporting.

Clark isn’t the only one who has dealt with stupidity in the media and the population in general. Brittney Griner and Megan Rapinoe are just two of the prominent female athletes who have faced hate and ill will in recent years. Even Clark’s opponent in the last two NCAA tournaments, Angel Reese, saw it firsthand, as she tearfully revealed in LSU’s press conference after her Tigers lost to Clark’s Hawkeyes in the Elite Eight this year.

The rivalry between Clark and Reese is undoubtedly good for the sport and will continue on June 1st when Clark’s Fever faces Reese’s Chicago Sky in the upcoming season. Although Clark and Reese were opponents on the court, the way they were pitted against each other (even though they expressed respect and admiration for each other) went too far. No player should have to endure death threats or be compared to a “cowardly dog,” like Reese was by Fox Sports’ Emmanuel Acho.

We need to be platform champions of the women’s game, like Holly Rowe and Chiney Ogwumike, and not give airtime to people like Doyel and Acho who either don’t understand how to deal with women or just want to use them as a springboard for terribly hot things lasts.

As a society, we still have a long way to go when it comes to how we treat women in general, and we certainly have a long way to go when it comes to coverage of women’s sports. For far too long, female athletes have been treated as second-class citizens, but the explosion in popularity of women’s basketball will hopefully usher in a new era of coverage that excludes the Gregg Doyels and Emmanuel Achos of the world and instead focuses on the simple fact that these women are great athletes and… are representatives of their sport. Maybe this is the real “Caitlin Clark effect.”