Caitlin Clark shares her 'welcome to the WNBA' moment

Caitlin Clark shared her “welcome to the WNBA” moment, and it was a painful experience, to say the least. While appearing on the New Heights podcast with Jason Kelce and Travis Kelce, Clark revealed that she injured her ear after making contact with a New York Liberty player.

“It was early on, I want to say it was our 10th game of the year. We’re playing in New York vs. the Liberty who ended up winning the championship this year,” Clark said. “Somebody set a screen on me. I hit my ear just perfect on the girl where my eardrum popped and ruptured. I knew it right away because I’ve done it before. It hurts so bad. …That was my welcome to the W moment.”

Travis Kelce then asked Clark what she did after it happened. “There’s not really much you can do,” she said. “It takes months to heal. After the season, the doctor had to go back in and look and see if it closed. If it doesn’t close, you have to have a minor procedure, but lucky enough it closed, so I was fine. You have to be careful about getting water in there. You can’t go in lakes and pools. It’s weird.”

Why Caitlin Clark chose Iowa over Notre Dame

The ruptured eardrum did not impact Clark’s rookie season as she was named WNBA Rookie of the Year, earned a spot on the All-WNBA First Team and led the Indiana Fever to the playoffs.

Along with talking about her rookie season in the WNBA, Caitlin Clark spoke to the Kelce brothers about her college career. The 22-year-old explained why she chose to play at Iowa over Notre Dame.

“I basically narrowed it down pretty early on,” Clark said. “When I was going through my college recruitment,  I wanted to be like in the Midwest, just kind of a homebody, family person. Just wanted to stay fairly close to home. So that narrowed a lot of stuff down. And I visited, like Oregon and Texas and a few other places, and I liked them, but it was just like, I knew it was too far. 

“And then I visited Notre Dame a bunch of times, and I was like, I love Notre Dame, and I like, as a kid, like, you want to go to Notre Dame … It’s like the coolest thing, it’s Notre Dame, it has that tradition. They’ve had so many great players go through there in every single sport. But like, I just knew, like, something I could feel it in my gut, I was, like, I’m not supposed to go there, so I picked Iowa.”