The 2024 Rookie of the Year has been one of the biggest sports sensations in recent years. Recently recognized as the AP female athlete of the year, the Iowa-born point guard’s future seems bright. But here’s the thing: Her extraordinary talent allowed her to choose between multiple teams for her NCAA basketball career and she chose to go with the Iowa Hawkeyes. Ever wondered why?

While talking to the NFL star Travis Kelce in the latest episode of his podcast New Heights with Jason and Travis Kelce, Caitlin Clark spoke about choosing The Iowa Hawkeyes in 2020 over Notre Dame. Clark said she visited Notre Dame “a bunch of times” before making her decision. “I visited Notre Dame a bunch of times,” Clark said, “I love Notre Dame and as a kid, you want to go to Notre Dame; it’s the same for Notre Dame football; it’s like the coolest thing in the world.”

But, Clark trusted her intuition and decided not to go with the Indiana-based team.  “It’s Notre Dame; it has that tradition. They’ve had so many great players go through there in every single sport. But I just knew, I could feel it in my gut that I was not supposed to go there.“, she shared.

However, it’s not just that still. She talked about other reasons that shaped her decision back in 2020. “And then it was obviously my home state too, and two hours from where I grew up, so perfect distance where, like, your parents can’t show up, but also, like, you can go home” Clearly, being a homebody also went into the decision making.

“I picked Iowa, and Iowa was really good at women’s basketball even before I went there too… But they hadn’t been to the final four since 1992. So, I wanted to go somewhere that was good, but maybe hadn’t been a blue blood per se for quite a few years and try and help them get back to that.” Clark added as she elaborated on her final choice. Let’s see how the choice turned out for the sports sensational.

How a close-to-home choice became Clark’s historic basketball stint

The rest, as they say, is history. In Caitlin Clark’s junior year, she landed an amazing 41-point triple-double in the Elite Eight against Louisville, a performance that will echo through the future of basketball. Not to mention the fact that she took the Hawkeyes to the NCAA Women’s Tournament Final for the first time in program history. She just keeps adding more records to her name.

Her close-to-home choice did bear fruit as we saw her averaging 27 points as a sophomore. Her game with the Iowa team was so spectacular that she surpassed Pete Maravich for an all-time NCAA points record. This record has changed history as it was held for more than 50 years.

During her stint with the Iowa team, she also made the record for scoring the most three-pointers in a single season in the Big Ten conference. Ultimately, Caitlin Clark’s choice to join the Iowa Hawkeyes in 2020 was a mix of practicality and intuition while also a desire to leave a mark. After four years, it is clear that she has achieved exactly that.