The Iowa Women's Basketball team is full of incredible athletes—and artists
How the Hawkeyes have perfected the art of basketball
Virginia Tech’s Women’s Basketball coach Kenny Brooks broke down in tears during a press conference the other day when asked about the growth of women’s basketball over the last few years. His team had just broken the attendance record for a women’s basketball game held in Virginia.
He talked about the hard work he’s seen from his teams over the years, women who have worked their asses off for a just modicum of respect. He chastises the social media trolls who refuse to let go of their misogyny for one second. He references a quote from Carmelo Anthony, where Anthony says “the women’s game is purest in its form.”
I’d call that artistry. And over the last two years, I, and the rest of the nation, have fallen in love with the stunning, creative, impassioned, artistic basketball of the Iowa Hawkeye Women’s Basketball Team.
To witness the Iowa Women’s Basketball Team play basketball together is to witness the act of creation in real time. They have mastered the movement of the basketball so eloquently. There is a precision to every step, every pass. The quickness and conciseness with which everything moves. The rhythm in how they shift together, the brilliance in their forethought as they move without the ball, appearing in unexpected places, creating something—a shot, a stop, a pass—where no one could have expected.
Their art continues to surprise, to innovate in unexpected ways, as it did in their comeback overtime win against Nebraska in the Big 10 Tournament Championship this past Sunday.
I have watched the video of Iowa guard Gabbie Marshall blocking the 3-point attempt of Nebraska’s Logan Nissley upwards of 100 times since the game.
The Iowa Hawkeye is known as a defensive menace. She’s quick and sprightly and focused and plays much bigger than her 5’9 stature suggests. My husband calls her a piss-ant—the highest compliment when your role is to disrupt the concentration of another quick and sprightly and focused basketball player for 40 minutes.
This particular block, Gabbie is playing as the highest version of herself. She’s guarding Jaz Shelley when she dribbles to her left and Gabbie’s teammate Kate Martin picks her up. Shelley darts a pass back to the now open Nissley who barely has time to blink before Gabbie’s hand is in her face. Gabbie gets a hand on the ball, moves around Nissley to grab it, and then has the wherewithal to call timeout during the final Big 10 Tournament game of her career.
It’s what happens after the whistle blows that I can’t stop watching. A surge of adrenaline, pure corporal energy, smacks Gabbie as hard as she blocked that almost 3-pointer and she just absolutely loses it. She lets out a primal scream as she marches to the bench, her teammates surrounding her with their own vibrant fervor.
I can sense what Gabbie felt in that moment, the elation of a creative energy that feels connected to something sacred, something bigger than yourself. It’s that deep, encompassing pleasure of feeling your creative genius flow through you. I feel it when I slide a word into a sentence that makes everything finally click, the shifting of my own language that unmoors something inside me.
To watch the Iowa Women’s Basketball team control a ball is to read a writer like Toni Morrison as she builds a sentence in previously unimaginable ways, to observe a painter like Caravaggio in all of his mastery of depth and perspective. Each team member an element of the masterpiece—Sydney Affolter imbuing heart into every moment, Kate Martin holding everything together as a complete work, Molly Davis with her quiet significance, the entire bench contributing life and depth. The smoothness of Hannah Stuelke creating her own path straight to the basket. The unexpected triumph in Taylor McCabe excelling behind the curve of the 3-point arc.
Fourteen women moving in sync, every part supporting the efforts of another. A piece of art does not exist in and of itself; it is of its context, its artist. What Lisa Bluder, Caitlin Clark, and the state of Iowa have created cannot be repeated.
Caitlin Clark seems to have broken nearly every record imaginable in her college career, most notably the all-time NCAA scoring record. Basket after basket drifts through the net, shots that I can’t even call improbable, more like humanly inhuman, befuddling, magic. Creating pure beauty out of what we think as nothing, what she thinks as her inevitability. She is a master of her craft.
But where her artistry truly lies is in her vision, of the court and her teammates and the space she is commanding. She can place a ball into any space so smoothly and cleanly, understanding distance and space in a way that defies logic.
The artistry of this team continues to surprise me in new and inventive ways, no matter how many Caitlin 3-pointers I watch sail from an improbable distance or the energy of a fast break initiated by Kylie Feuerbach’s hands. This is why we create and why we consume—to understand, in ways we’ve never before considered, what it means to exist.
I see the essence of art lying in the ways we evoke a human response in our witnesses, and the artistry of the Iowa Women’s Basketball team has become such an engrossing spectacle to watch. I sense such a strong undercurrent of heart and an infiltrating sense of vibrant emotion. Girls that have played together for years, who clearly feel a spiritual level of connection and drive. Athletes made of the same cloth. There is such an honesty to the way that they play together, their bodies moving in the truth that they sincerely love one another and the sport of basketball and that they will flow elementally together to create something raw and real for us to live inside of.
I feel like I’ve just read a book that has shifted my understanding of the world when I watch these women, a work that has revealed a fundamental truth that makes the world tick—the concrete foundations of friendship between women, the aliveness of feeling part of something bigger than yourself, and the capability of humans to pull together still in the midst of this fucked up world.
Commanding a space—your page, your canvas, your melody, your basketball court—and mastering each element around you, exerting absolute control on your materials as you mold it into something beautiful. No piece out of place, no lazy form, no unexamined understanding of who you’re trying to be as an artist or what you’re trying to create. This is the artist I see in this team. This is the artist I want to be.
When Gabbie walked from the floor after her block with such intensity, emotion quite literally screaming from her body, she knew she just created something beautiful. She stood tall in the face of potential destruction. She molded the game to her will. It’s that same excitement I feel when I find the meaning I didn’t know was hiding beneath my words, as I pulled this essay from the messy free write in my journal and found a way to convey to you just how captivated I am by this team. That I see precision and inventiveness and tension and an entire new understanding of the world in the way they move a basketball. To be witnessing this at the same time as the rest of the world feels like watching an HBO series finale live with my Twitter timeline, discussing a book with my mom and sister. To witness something this stunning, in community with others living in their own amazement, is what makes art such an electrifying, humanizing experience.
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Your words are such a beautiful, insightful description of this wondrous “Thing” we are witnessing and celebrating. Thank you!
Your description of Iowa women's basketball could have been said about the men's game about 30 or so years ago, when Magic, Bird, Dr. J. and Jordan trod the boards. Great piece about a great team, Macey.