Editor’s note: This article was written by Tom Friend and first appeared in Sports Business Journal, the industry’s leading source of sports business news, events and data.

The first of probably a gazillion “Want To Be Like Caitlin” moments occurred after her first preseason game in the Dallas area, where prepubescent girls in No. 22 jerseys waited courtside on their tip-toes. Surrounded by security, the most recognizable women’s player on seven continents (insert Diana Taurasi snarl here) had already been whisked to her Indiana Fever locker room at the College Park Center in Arlington, unavailable for photo ops or probing questions such as “Are you really addicted to chocolate chip cookies?”

No one had the heart to tell the kids Caitlin Clark was gone for the night, not to be back in Texas until July, but then again, that’s what team executives are for. Allison Barber, the Fever president and COO with a Ph.D. in leadership, noticed two forlorn second graders in particular who were “desperate, just desperate” to be eye-to-eye with Clark — and she knew this because they had tugged furiously on her sleeve to ask, “Are you the coach? Are you the coach?”

Barber told them no — “They were so deflated,” she said — but she promised the actual Fever head coach, Christie Sides, would be arriving in mere minutes. From there, the precious meter went through the roof.

“What’s it like to coach Caitlin Clark?” the girls were soon asking Sides.

“She’s got the green light,” Sides answered.

“This is the joy of a lifetime!’’ one of the second graders said, at which point the girls handed the coach two beaded bracelets to give to Clark for them, each monogrammed with a homemade “CC.” Sides promised she would, and Clark later posed for a picture on the team bus, wearing one on her wrist. Barber texted the photo, with a heart emoji, to their mom.

So that’s the fine line the WNBA walks right now as it enters its 28th and most wondrous/curious/lucrative/televised season ever: Protect Caitlin, humanize Caitlin, monetize Caitlin, leverage Caitlin, don’t exploit Caitlin.

“We’ve all really been disciplined around thinking about how Caitlin is a person, not a product,” Barber said later. “And that’s an important strategic mindset for us. We’ll make as many moments as we can [like in Dallas], understanding that she’s driving sales and sponsorship and she’s a business machine. But, to us, she’s a person.”

Who actually does devour chocolate chip cookies.

• Want to receive a nightly roundup of sports business news to your inbox? Sign up for Sports Business Journal’s Unpacks Lite newsletter below.

The WNBA wasn’t built in a day, but in 9,855 (27 years’ worth). As Clark embarks on her rookie season — with 36 of her 40 games on national television and the other four on WNBA League Pass — she and every person affiliated with the W are quick to point out: This was a laborious process. “We’ve all stood on the shoulders of giants,’’ said Atlanta Dream head coach Tanisha Wright.

Whether it was Lisa Leslie or Sheryl Swoopes or Candace Parker or Maya Moore or Sue Bird or perhaps the greatest of them all, Taurasi, the WNBA has long had amenable, marketable stars. From a business standpoint, the breakthroughs were the hiring of Deloitte CEO Cathy Engelbert as the league’s first commissioner in 2019. Or the “The Wubble” at IMG Academy during the 2020 pandemic that put a rarefied spotlight on the league. Or the $75 million capital infusion of 2022. Or its most-watched regular season ever of 2023. Or Sabrina Ionescu’s battle of the sexes against Steph Curry.

Last year alone, the New York Liberty saw an 89.3% leap in ticket sales and attracted sellouts of 17,000-plus to the Barclays Center for the WNBA Finals. The Atlanta Dream, under a new ownership group three years ago, incrementally increased its front office staff from seven to 50 and led the league last season with 12 sellouts. The back-to-back champion Las Vegas Aces led the W in overall attendance last year, while debuting a loaded $40 million practice facility. The Phoenix Mercury one-upped the Aces by building their own chic practice facility for $100 million, due to open before the city’s 2024 All-Star Game.

The Minnesota Lynx, hoping to double their fan base over a five-year period, hit record levels of corporate support through Fortune 500 and 1000 companies in the Twin Cities. The Connecticut Sun scheduled the first WNBA game this year at Boston’s TD Garden. The Dallas Wings, as of last week, were already up 150% in ticket revenue. The Washington Mystics, longtime trendsetters with their dynamic ticket pricing, were among the first WNBA teams to produce a robust secondary ticket market.

The Seattle Storm unveiled premium ticket offerings at Climate Pledge Arena’s Möet & Chandon Impérial Lounge. NBA royalty Dwyane Wade became part-owner of the Chicago Sky, with this year’s draft pick Angel Reese begging Wade to coax Michael Jordan to a game. The Los Angeles Sparks have an even swankier celebrity owner: Magic Johnson. Curry’s Warriors were awarded a 2025 expansion team.

But with all of that as a backdrop, nothing registered more on the WNBA Richter scale than Clark turning pro on Feb. 29, putting the Indiana Fever (which won the draft lottery in December) on the clock and obscuring all those leaguewide gains. During Clark’s NCAA Tournament run at Iowa, 50% of the TV audience was new to women’s basketball and hellbent on following her to the pros. The cynical reaction was: This is the WNBA’s moment; they’d better not whiff. The league’s media rights were also up for bid alongside the NBA’s, and every network wanted a piece of the W. It was Caitlin this, Caitlin that, Caitlin’s saving the W, Caitlin, Caitlin, Caitlin.

Oh Lord, that didn’t sit well with DT.

■ ■ ■ ■

We had a situation here. At no fault of her own, Clark — a longtime Maya Moore fan and aficionado of league history — was getting altogether too much pub. During an appearance on Scott Van Pelt’s “SportsCenter,” Taurasi (41 years old to Clark’s 22) couldn’t bite her tongue any longer, saying: “Look, SVP, reality is coming. …You look superhuman playing against 18-year-olds, but you’re going to [be going against] some grown women that have been playing professional basketball for a long time.”

Clark hadn’t even shot a logo 3-pointer yet (hell, she hadn’t even been drafted yet), and she was passive-aggressively being told: Know your place, child. It could have divided the league. Instead, it was a marketer’s dream.

The Gen X business staff for Taurasi’s team, the Mercury, wasted no time designing a ticket promotion for the June 30 Phoenix-Indiana game under the heading: “The GOAT vs. The Rook.” Clark still wasn’t officially on the Fever, but what did the Mercury care? They drew up a little silhouette of a No. 22 and trolled Caitlin Clark for all to see.

“We all went, ‘Ohhh, that’s pretty bold,’” said Krista May, the Connecticut Sun vice president of marketing and communications whose team had luckily drawn the Fever for its home opener but was waiting until after the draft to promote it. “I mean, that was smart marketing. I love that the Mercury leaned in on it like, ‘Yeah, [Taurasi] said it.’”

Clark paid it no mind, but the message had been sent across the W: All’s fair in love and ticket sales. “That [GOAT vs. Rook] was just leveraging DT and saying, ‘Yeah, we’ll see how you do when you get here,’” said Mystics Chief Business Officer and President Alycen McAuley. “That’s the trash talking that maybe people didn’t realize has been in the women’s game for quite some time.’’

The ad basically set the tone for creative sales strategies in every city. The Sun’s mantra had been “Bring the Heat,” so May’s marketing team conveniently drew up an ad challenging the Fever (the perfect name for it) to “bring their own heat.” In Minnesota, they scheduled Maya Moore’s jersey retirement on the night of a Fever game, Moore being Clark’s hero. The Sparks, Mystics, Aces and Dream all swapped their Fever games into more cavernous arenas, while the Storm, Liberty and Lynx all opened their venues’ upper bowls. StubHub has already seen a 93% rise in year-over-year WNBA ticket sales.

All those analytics were pointing Clark square in the face. According to ticketing company TFL, the Fever had accounted for 65% of leaguewide ticket sales, while the average WNBA ticket price for a Clark game ($175, according to StubHub) was 2.3 times higher than for other games. Courtside tickets on the secondary market for Clark games were listing for as much as $16,000 in Phoenix, $17,000 in Dallas, $18,000 in D.C. and a gluttonous $57,000 in Vegas.

“This will be the most-attended, most-viewed, most socially-digitally engaged season in the history of the WNBA,” said Greg Bibb, Wings CEO, president and partner.

In other words, the grown-ups will be watching from their tip-toes, too.

■ ■ ■ ■

Someone had to keep their heads about themselves, and, fortuitously, it was the team that drafted her.

The Fever heard Clark was turning pro on Feb. 29 just like the rest of us — from a random tweet — and it floored them a bit because Todd Taylor, the team’s COO, remembered worrying: “Are Iowa grads going to suddenly chip in $25 million in NIL for her to stay another year?” But the millisecond he got the good news, while on a team sponsor trip to Grand Cayman, Taylor called Barry Gibson, senior vice president of ticket sales, to essentially say (and this is an Indy term): Start your engines.

The inbound phone calls for tickets were immediate, with as many as 5,000 leads coming in rapid fire, but Gibson had reinforcements. Because the Fever and NBA Pacers are both owned by Herb Simon’s Pacers Sports & Entertainment, Taylor and Gibson could combine the sales staffs for those first frantic 72 hours. “Our sales staff stayed all weekend,” Taylor said. “Just to call everyone back and try and figure out who was serious about buying season-ticket plans, who was trying to buy tickets for resale later, versus people who were admirers of her just looking for a single game. So we brought in a lot of pizza.”

It was no state secret they were drafting Clark, considering they retweeted her announcement and congratulated her online to boot. The issue was more: What are the appropriate ticket prices? They ultimately morphed the Pacers’ 41-game template into a 20-game Fever package, using Pacers analytics and price points (both from the primary and secondary markets) as a model. They decided the cheapest standard price in Gainbridge Fieldhouse’s 200 level would be only $15, while there would be a dozen different pricing zones in the lower bowl to keep the market sane.

So while the Fever could have gouged their fan base, they instead focused on fair season-ticket prices in the mezzanine, lower bowl and courtside, which were mostly gobbled up. For the balcony, they sold just two individual games a day leading up to the draft — while trying to analyze the resale market — and, in the end, Bookies.com reported that the average Fever ticket price was roughly $30, third lowest in the league. Which seemed nuts.

“Herb was very adamant that while other places are really profiting off of [Clark] coming to the league, he wanted to make sure our tickets were reasonable for our fans,” Taylor said. “So we probably could have gone higher for our season tickets.”

Beyond the Fever’s control, courtside seats for the home opener against the Liberty ascended to $2,933 on the secondary market — peanuts compared to Las Vegas’ $57K — but, still, Barber preferred to hear the other side stories. How a family from Belgium called the Mystics saying they wanted to sync their summer trip to D.C. with a Clark game at Capital One Arena. Or how fans began sending homemade Caitlin basketball cards and calendars for Barber to sell, not knowing she couldn’t peddle unlicensed products. No one — not these fans or other WNBA teams — meant to exploit “the Rook.” It wasn’t personal. It was business.

The Fever had no choice but to hire 15 to 20 new employees, from outbound ticket sales reps to guest service personnel to security to even new social media strategists. No team in the league was more prepared to bring fans behind the curtain. Led by Tyler Beadlescomb, VP and head of digital strategy — who arrived from TikTok — the Fever are compiling Caitlin and Co. content around the clock, ready to post one of her logo 3s at a moment’s notice. (Insert DT snarl here.)