In October 2024, Solari published a guest post by Dr. Terrence Leveck about the Women’s National Basketball Association’s (WNBA’s) Caitlin Clark, picked by the Indiana Fever in 2024 following her stellar college basketball career at the University of Iowa. During her time at Iowa—where she earned “the remarkable distinction of being the greatest scorer in college basketball history” for both men’s and women’s college basketball—media coined the term the “Caitlin Clark effect” to describe the dramatically increased popularity of women’s basketball inspired by her riveting skills.

Clark remains a sports “phenom” in 2026, and former Food Series host Harry Blazer, like Leveck, is a fan. To illustrate Clark’s extraordinary appeal, Blazer observes that her arrival at the Fever made 2024 the WNBA’s most-watched and most highly attended season in over two decades. In that season, Leveck praised not just Clark’s game but “her winning personality, humor, [and] generosity with her legion of young fans,” but also remarked on her “good-natured willingness to refrain from criticism of other players even when they injure her in the course of play.”

On that more somber point, both Leveck and Blazer wonder whether the league is doing enough to protect Clark from injurious opponents. As Blazer recently wrote:

“Clark has taken a remarkable amount of physical punishment and psychological testing. Some of that is basketball…. But there is a line between hard competition and permitted intimidation…. A league cannot claim to value a player’s brilliance while allowing opponents to disrupt that brilliance through uncalled excessive contact…. Clark’s game depends on timing, rhythm, space and confidence. If defenders are allowed to maul, bump, shove and body her beyond the rules, the league is not preserving toughness. It is permitting the degradation of its own best product.”

For those who are already Caitlin Clark fans, or for those just learning about Clark, Blazer’s two recent Substack articles provide fascinating insights about Clark’s athletic magnetism as well as the lacunae of a system that seems to be having trouble creating “an architecture, culture and coaching philosophy that allow [Clark] to remain in flow.” One way or another, as Leveck wrote two years ago, “Caitlin Clark is the story that keeps on giving.”

Harry Blazer writes on a variety of topics at harry’s Substack.