USA Basketball selection committee chairperson Jen Rizzotti was plenty aware of the uproar on TV talk shows and social media about not taking Clark, and she didn’t mind talking about it.
“Just a little bit,” Rizzotti said with a laugh, one of the only moments when she could afford one.
“As much as you want to maybe make conversation around how we should have considered TV viewership or jersey sales or popularity, that wasn’t the purview of the committee to have those discussions,” she continued. “We had to block out some of that outside noise. It was a hard decision for a lot of players that didn’t make the team.”
Rizzotti also specifically addressed a major component of that “outside noise”: men who haven’t watched much women’s basketball before but tune in to watch Clark’s games on national TV.
“I know a lot of men that pay attention to women’s basketball,” she said, “and I would hope that the journey that this team is about to take, and the unprecedented amount of success that they’ve had, is a story enough for people to want to follow it, and to market it, and to pay attention to these extraordinary 12 women that are going to be representing us this summer in Paris.”
