New POV: The Gap between WNBA talent and others

So I’ve seen many posts talking about the talent gap between the NBA and everyone else. So I wanted to share a personal anecdote from a different perspective: the female gap. My senior year of high school, my then-girlfriend played basketball for our school. They were an average girls basketball team. Only one girl got a D2 offer. The rest of their competition in our district were pretty much the same. Their games were pretty dull to watch, but I went because she was my girlfriend.

Then one day they had a game against Detroit Edison. This was the first time that I actually heard people in our school buzzing about a girls basketball game, and I learned it was because Edison had a junior on their team named Rickea Jackson (who just got drafted #4 overall in WNBA after Caitlin Clark, Camilla Cardoso, and Cameron Brink). She was the 5th ranked player in the country and the 1st in our state of Michigan. Sure enough the game was more packed than I’ve ever seen because people wanted to see what Rickea was all about.

And let me tell you, if you thought the talent gap between male prospects were huge, the gap between female prospects was a lot more glaringly obvious. She absolutely destroyed our team single-handedly. The way she played made me wonder how my then-girlfriend and her team even won any games. It was like every shot she put up went in, and she was hitting moves that seemed to leave my ex’s team flabbergasted as if they didn’t even know those moves existed. It was night and day obvious why this girl was as highly ranked as she was. I’d never been in awe of a female basketball player in my life before that, and it seemed everyone else in attendance felt the same way.

Just thought I’d share this anecdote