Iowa’s game Sunday against Ohio State is the hottest ticket in women’s basketball history, and it’s easy to see why.
Superstar Caitlin Clark is 18 points shy of passing Pete Maravich’s NCAA Division I scoring record. On Thursday, she declared for the 2024 WNBA Draft, making it known this is her final season at Iowa — and making Sunday her senior day at Carver-Hawkeye Arena. Oh, and the opponent, No. 3 Ohio State, already beat Clark and Iowa this season in a game that ended with a court-storming Buckeyes fan crashing into her.
The matchup is the most expensive women’s basketball game, college or WNBA, on record, according to data from secondary marketplace TickPick.
The current price to get into the game on TickPick is $503, which is 49 percent more expensive than the “get-in” price of $354 for the Iowa-Michigan game on Feb. 15 when Clark broke the women’s NCAA all-time scoring record. The lowest-priced non-student ticket available on StubHub as of 8 p.m. ET on Thursday was $395. However, that number does not include the fulfillment and service fee, which varied in the low hundreds depending on the ticket’s face value.
The overall average purchase price of tickets listed on TickPick as of Wednesday morning, a day before Clark’s draft declaration, was $546. That’s 1,014 percent more expensive than the TickPick average purchase price for NCAA women’s basketball games this season ($49).
TickPick content strategy lead Kyle Zorn said the marketplace has seen an increase in tickets posted for sale over the last few days, and a big reason for that are the storylines surrounding the game.
Clark became the top scorer in major women’s college basketball when she hit 3,650 career points Wednesday and broke the NCAA women’s single-season record for 3s by sinking her 155th 3-pointer.
“Whenever history is involved, people want to be there, and people are willing to pay the price depending on market value,” Zorn said. “Basketball is the type of sport that’s very star-driven. We see this very evidently in the NBA with LeBron James and Steph Curry. Obviously Caitlin Clark, she’s must-watch in any game that she goes to, whether home or away.”
GO DEEPER
How did Caitlin Clark break the NCAA women’s basketball scoring record?
Iowa holds seven of TickPick’s 10 most expensive women’s basketball games on record by average purchase price, including the top five spots.
Most expensive WBB games (via TickPick)
|
Game
|
Average ticket price
|
|---|---|
|
Ohio State at Iowa (3/3/24) |
$546 |
|
Michigan at Iowa (2/15/24) |
$394 |
|
Illinois at Iowa (2/25/24) |
$381 |
|
Indiana at Iowa (1/13/24) |
$273 |
|
Iowa at Northwestern (1/31/24) |
$256 |
|
Alabama at South Carolina (2/22/24) |
$190 |
|
Nebraska at Iowa (1/27/24) |
$173 |
|
2022 WNBA All-Star Game (7/10/22) |
$150 |
|
Game 3 2023 WNBA Finals (10/25/23) |
$148 |
|
Penn State at Iowa (2/8/24) |
$142 |
The season ticket rate for Iowa women’s basketball was $195, though the team announced on social media that those tickets sold out in August 2023. The Iowa Athletics ticket office didn’t offer single-game tickets but noted in an email to The Athletic that those tickets “would have been around $13 per game on average.”
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(Photo: David Berding / Getty Images)
