Game against Caitlin Clark, Iowa raises Wisconsin women’s basketball crowd average.

The Caitlin Clark experience brought the largest home crowd for a University of Wisconsin women’s basketball game in at least the last 17 seasons to the Kohl Center.

The Badgers’ Dec. 10 game against Clark and Iowa had 12,142 tickets scanned, by far the highest since Wisconsin started using digital scanners at gates in 2006.

The number of tickets scanned better represents the actual crowd size than the announced attendance or the number of tickets distributed.

The previous high was 9,409 for a game against Minnesota on Jan. 28, 2007.

Clark, the reigning national player of the year who was at the center of a surge of interest in NCAA women’s basketball, scored 28 points in 35 minutes of the Hawkeyes’ 87-65 victory over the Badgers. It was billed as Wisconsin’s first sellout crowd since a Jan. 20, 2002, game against Minnesota drew an announced 17,142.

The announced crowd for the 2023 game against Iowa, however, was 14,252. Wisconsin now sells most of its tickets for women’s basketball games as general admission so it doesn’t fill the entire arena.

The big crowd brought the Badgers’ season average for ticket scans to 2,265, the highest it has been since the 2009-10 season. Without the Iowa game, the average fell to 1,648, a figure more in line with most recent seasons.

Wisconsin was 9-8 at home and 15-17 overall in the 2023-24 season, which ended with a 65-60 loss to Saint Louis in the quarterfinals of the Women’s National Invitation Tournament on April 1.

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