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THEY DON’T TEXT or meet for coffee. “Friends” may be the quaint way to describe them, but “rivals” is just as accurate. There’s an old photo of Caitlin Clark and Ashley Joens that captures their youthful harmony and singular focus. It was taken in the summer of 2017, when 11 teenagers from Iowa made it to the Nike Elite Youth Basketball League finals in Chicago.
Standing behind the bleachers, Clark and Joens are, of course, in the middle of the frame. They were the two best players on the team. All Iowa Attack director Dickson Jensen — who IDs himself as the old grumpy guy on the left — isn’t sure if he’s supposed to say this, but Joens dislocated her shoulder in a game that week, ran over to the sideline and had Jensen pop it back into place. She went back in and hit a pair of free throws.
Clark was two years younger than most of the girls on the 17-and-under AAU team, but she didn’t act it. Flashy and confident, she rallied them back from nine points down with just over a minute to go in the quarterfinals, coolly nailing four 3-pointers.
“I’ve coached against some of the greatest players in the country,” Jensen says. “What comes to mind when I look at that picture is that those are just a bunch of Iowa kids who have no chance to win the game. How in the heck did we accomplish this? They’re just average kids that work really, really hard. Those two … they were really good. This was the kickoff of their career that began to put them in the spotlight.”
Despite having suitors from all over the country, Clark and Joens stayed in Iowa. Joens, a 6-foot-1 guard/forward who grew up in Iowa City just five miles from Carver-Hawkeye Arena, wound up two hours away in Ames at Iowa State; Clark, a 6-foot guard from West Des Moines whose older brother…
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Source : espn
