Caitlin Clark isn't women's college basketball's all-time leading scorer. At least not yet

You won't see Lynette Woodard's name in the NCAA record book, but the former Kansas star's fascinating career is worth appreciating

This week, I’m going to be running a pair of somewhat related stories tied to Caitlin Clark breaking Kelsey Plum’s NCAA Division I career scoring record last week. It has been perhaps the biggest story in college basketball, men’s or women’s, this season and, frankly, I feel like I haven’t devoted nearly enough attention and coverage to what has been a compelling women’s basketball season.

Now, on to the first installment…

Caitlin Clark made history in characteristically effortless fashion, firing a shot from the edge of Iowa’s hawkeye logo at midcourt only for it to glide through the net. 

After Clark made the 480th 3-pointer of her college career on her way to her 3,528th career point, she clenched her fists and let out a triumphant and perhaps cathartic scream as the sellout crowd of 14,998 fans packed inside Iowa’s Carver-Hawkeye Arena went crazy after the born-and-bred Iowan officially etched her name atop perhaps the most prestigious list that NCAA women’s basketball has to offer.

In the opening minutes of a 106-89 Hawkeyes victory against Michigan in which she poured in a career-high 49 points, Clark became the No. 1 career scorer in NCAA Division I history, passing former Washington star Kelsey Plum.

The moment was covered exhaustively, as it should have been. Clark has been perhaps the most visible college athlete in any sport for the past year, but on this night, it wasn’t just the usual appreciation for her otherworldly talent. It was a coronation.

There’s no asterisk next to her honor. Though she could play a fifth year with the pandemic-related waiver she and other college athletes of the time received, Clark is in just her fourth college season and even got to her record-setting mark in 13 fewer games than Plum.

Her title as the all-time scoring champion at the highest level of women’s college basketball is a technicality, though. That distinction, at least for now, still belongs to Lynette Woodard.

Lynette Woodard’s road to scoring immortality

If Woodard’s name is unfamiliar to you, even as a basketball fan, don’t worry. It’s basically that way by design.

Over the course of a stellar four-year career at Kansas from 1977-81, Woodard scored 3,649 points, 80 more than where Clark sits right now. But because the NCAA didn’t have governing power over women’s basketball during Woodard’s career – it did so just one year later in 1982, taking over from the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) – her accomplishments don’t live on in NCAA record books. Given the NCAA’s role as the arbiter of college sports and how its history is memorialized, it’s as if those thousands of points don’t exist.

That small bit of legalese, though, obscures one of the more decorated and fascinating individual careers in the sport’s history.

Born in Wichita in 1959, only eight years after the city’s public school system abandoned formal segregation, Woodard was a two-time state champion at Wichita North High School before heading to her home state’s flagship university.