“It Will Break the Sport”: Citing Caitlin Clark’s Instance, Geno Auriemma Warns WNBA

The WNBA draft is bittersweet. Whereas well-known NCAA girls’s basketball gamers comparable to Angel Reese, Caitlin Clark, and Kamilla Cardoso had their time committing to the WNBA groups, it’s the left-behind NCAA coaches who must then make a workforce for themselves as soon as once more. The College of Connecticut Huskies too misplaced two of its mainstay gamers Nika Muhl and Aaliyah Edwards. Their coach Geno Auriemma was requested concerning the distinction in eligibility guidelines within the NBA and WNBA, and what perspective he had on his emotional expertise.

Auriemma gave his tackle the distinction in age issue within the eligibility guidelines and the way that has affected faculty basketball. Followers have been shocked to listen to such a singular perspective on the identical. So what are his ideas?

Geno Auriemma warns concerning the present guidelines

Auriemma was current at ECM UN Sports activities ESPN when he was requested the lingering query on Thursday as per a YT video. A measured Auriemma echoed phrases of knowledge warning the WNBA and shared his ideas on how that has impacted the NCAA girls’s basketball recreation.

“Nicely, it relies upon whether or not you need the sport to develop or whether or not you need to kill it. If you wish to kill it then let the youngsters depart after freshman 12 months. Which is like on the lads’s aspect, it’s turn into transactional. Okay, everyone’s a free agent. Everyone’s a mercenary. It’s not the child’s fault. All proper?,” Auriemma acknowledged.

“So that you go, you play. You’re good, you go to… you go to the NBA. You go, you play, you’re good, you go to a different college. As a result of they offer you more cash. All proper, in order that’s beginning to impression the… the ladies’s recreation. To me what helped the ladies’s recreation develop is the folks in Iowa bought to develop up with Caitlin Clark. The folks in Connecticut bought to develop up with all my nice gamers. There’s one thing to be mentioned for that,”  the 70-year-old enunciated.

“You understand when gamers stick with their workforce lengthy sufficient to construct a model. I don’t know that that that our recreation can proceed to maneuver ahead if unexpectedly our guys are gone, after which we by no means hear from them once more as a result of they’re enjoying in the course of the summer season and they usually’re not on our workforce anymore… So I just like the rule, and if they alter the rule God bless them however I believe it’ll wreck the sport,” Auriemma defined.

The eligibility guidelines for the NBA and WNBA differ so much. Whereas males’s basketball gamers can enter the NBA draft on the age of 19, girls basketball gamers have to attend until the age of twenty-two. When speaking of sophistication, the NBA participant must be one 12 months faraway from highschool whereas the WNBA gamers must be of their senior 12 months. This distinction has usually led to completely different views from completely different entities of the sport. However Auriemma’s take presents a singular angle.

Think about if nice gamers like Clark would have been drafted after their first 12 months. The 22-year-old headlined girls’s basketball this season. And it was as a consequence of her presence that followers flocked to the stadium, promoting report tickets. Whereas the lads’s recreation had 14.82 million viewers as per Nielsen (h/t: AP information), the NCAA finals girls’s recreation had 18.7 million viewers. And followers at the moment are ready for his or her faculty basketball stars to carry out on the large stage.

The WNBA draft 2024 had some attention-grabbing outcomes

Clark was the no.1 choose by the Indiana Fever within the not too long ago concluded draft. Equally, Cardoso was drafted by Chicago Sky, a workforce that may also have Clark’s rival Angel Reese. Whereas Stanford’s Cameron Brink will likely be seen enjoying for the Los Angeles Sparks this season. In the meantime, Edwards and Muhl will ply their commerce for the Washington Mystics and the Seattle Storm respectively. Subsequently, it will likely be a deal with to look at for followers.

Simply as Clark and different well-known gamers impacted the NCAA, the incoming batch of athletes will hopefully do the identical. Whereas the followers stay divided over the distinction in eligibility guidelines, there isn’t any doubt that Auriemma gave a truthful tackle the identical.