ESPN Report: Very Sad News” IOWA women Basketball Coach Call Caitlin Clark’s Orphan…

IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — Caitlin Clark’s skills were so advanced when she was in grade school that her parents signed her up to play on boys teams. By the time she entered middle school she was well-known in basketball circles across Iowa.

This was long before Clark became one of the faces of women’s basketball and, now, on the cusp of setting the NCAA Division I scoring record.

Clark was in sixth grade when Jan Jensen first heard about her. Not long after, Iowa’s associate head coach and chief recruiter went to watch the prodigy from West Des Moines.

She saw a confident player making pinpoint passes often too hot for her teammates to handle, someone who was creative on drives to the hoop and of course someone willing to launch the deep 3-pointers that would become her signature and one of the reasons she’s one of the United States’ highest-profile female athletes.

“It didn’t take but a second, maybe a minute,” Jensen said. “That little step-back sassy 3, this little seventh-, eighth-grader. Yeah, she’s diff. You could just tell. They’re easy to identify but really hard to get. Everybody can see the true, true ones. The trick is to get them.”

Clark needs 66 points to break the NCAA career record of 3,527 by Washington’s Kelsey Plum (2013-17). The Hawkeyes play Penn State at home on Thursday. With an average of 32.4 points per game, Clark is on track to break the record at Nebraska on Sunday or Feb. 15 at home against Michigan.

“I didn’t predict this to happen, but just knowing her work ethic, knowing her passion for the sport, knowing her fearlessness, I’m really not surprised,” said Kristin Meyer, who coached Clark from 2016-20 at Dowling Catholic High in West Des Moines. “More than anything, I’m so happy for her to get to accomplish all of these things, to grow the sport and to grow the popularity of women’s basketball and also the state of Iowa.”

The daughter of Brent Clark and Anne Nizzi-Clark grew up as the middle child in a sports-centric family. Caitlin said when she first started playing basketball, she would cry after every game her team lost.

“That’s because of how much I cared,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I’m like 6 years old and it didn’t matter, obviously. But it mattered to me.”

That passion for winning took root when she and brothers Blake and Colin played board games and all kinds of sports against each other. She recalled a basement Nerf basketball game with Colin that got overheated.

“I just threw him into the wall,” she said. “He went flying and his head slapped into it. He put his hand back and it was just full of blood. He runs upstairs to my mom. She goes and gets a bunch of staples in his head.”

Meyer was preparing for her first year as Dowling High coach in 2016 when she first heard about a “stud eighth-grader” who would be joining the team.

“I was, ‘OK, that’s nice. We’ll have a good player,’” Meyer said.