The WNBA posted on social media Friday to commemorate Caitlin Clark’s record-breaking rookie season. 

But fans took issue with the post not including the full extent of Clark’s assist total. 

“Clark notched the single-season assists record with 321 total dimes, as well set the all-time single-game assist record against the Dallas Wings with 19,” the post said. 

Clark actually finished the season with 337 assists, the new record. 

The previous record was 315, and Clark’s 316th assist broke the record. However, in the game in which she recorded her 316th assist Sept. 13 against the Las Vegas Aces, Clark finished the night with 321 on the season. 

Still, the number used in the post has drawn the mockery of WNBA and Caitlin Clark fans. 

“The amount of things this account gets wrong daily is staggering. Caitlin has 337 assists. How hard is it to look up stats on your own page,” one user wrote. 

Another frustrated user wrote, “Caitlin Clark had 337 regular season assists and then 17 more from her 2 post season games. How hard is it to get basic stats correct?”

Many have also called for X to add a community note to the post to clarify that Clark finished with 16 more assists than what the post says. 

Clark’s impact on the court in her rookie season changed the fate of her team and the landscape of the WNBA.

This year’s WNBA draft, where the Indiana Fever selected Clark with the first overall pick, averaged 2.45 million viewers, the most in WNBA draft history, and it was the most-watched WNBA telecast since 2000. The top 15 most-watched WNBA games of the regular season have all included Clark. She helped the league draw record TV audiences for games played at the same time as NFL games. 

CAITLIN CLARK EXPECTED TO JOIN DAVID LETTERMAN FOR HIS LECTURE SERIES AS BUSY OFFSEASON CONTINUES

Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark (22) celebrates with Indiana Fever guard Lexie Hull (10) during the second quarter against the Dallas Wings at College Park Center.  (Kevin Jairaj/USA Today Sports)

Indiana lost 10 of its first 13 games to start the season, but when Clark got hot, so did the Fever. A four-game winning streak kicked off what became an awesome stretch for the Fever, and they wound up going 17-10 in their final 27 games, clinching a playoff spot.

In her first 14 games, Clark posted up-and-down numbers, failing to reach 15 points in a game seven times, but dropping 20-plus another six. But she posted double-digit points in her next 25 games and played much more consistently.

Over a 19-game stretch, Clark averaged 21.9 points and 10.5 assists. In that span, she recorded at least a dozen assists nine times. That span also included a WNBA record 19 assists July 17 against the Dallas Wings. 

Clark finished averaging 19.2 points, 8.4 assists (which led the WNBA) and 5.7 rebounds. Her 19.2 points were the most by any rookie this season.

Indiana Fever guard Lexie Hull (10) and guard Caitlin Clark (22) watch from the bench in the fourth quarter during Game 1 of the first round of the 2024 WNBA Playoffs at Mohegan Sun Arena. (Mark Smith/Imagn Images)

Clark set records for the most points and 3-pointers by a rookie in league history, while also becoming the first rookie to record a triple-double, a feat she accomplished twice. Her 337 assists not only were the most by a rookie, but they were the most by any player ever in a single season.

A recent YouGov study found Clark is among the most popular basketball players in the world in 2024, ranking among athletes like LeBron James and Stephen Curry. Clark’s followers include large numbers of men and women. 

The “Caitlin Clark effect” became universally adopted by media outlets over the last year to describe the impact Clark had on women’s basketball at the college and pro levels.

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History will be made Saturday when the Southern Section crowns its first girls’ flag football champions at El Modena High’s Fred Kelly Stadium.

The prime-time matchup at 4:45 p.m. will feature No. 1-seeded Orange Lutheran against No. 2 Newport Harbor for the Division I title in a rematch of their regular-season meeting Aug. 24 in which the Lancers prevailed 28-12. Since then, the Sailors have reeled off 24 wins in a row, including a 12-7 triumph over Sunset League rival Huntington Beach in the semifinals.

There were no official CIF playoffs last season but Jason Guyser’s squad went 25-1 and ended up ranked first in California and third in the nation. Many key players are back, including receiver/defensive backs Maddy Michel and Audrey Burns and linebackers Paige Shanahan and Ella Woods.

Meanwhile, the Lancers (22-2), coached by Kristen Sherman, boast an opportunistic secondary that has picked off 59 passes this year — the last three of which came in a 19-6 semifinal victory over Anaheim Canyon. Sophomore Josie Anderson leads the way with nine interceptions.

Fans will also be treated to a head-to-head duel between two of the best dual-threat quarterbacks in the Southland in Orange Lutheran sophomore Makena Cook and Newport Harbor senior Maia Helmar. Both can run and pass the ball with equal aplomb and are leaders for their respective teams.

The day begins with an All-Orange County matchup in Division 3 pitting San Clemente against Troy at 9:30 a.m. and if their two previous meetings are any indication, it could be decided on the last possession. On Sept. 3 the Warriors won 31-25 and on Oct. 1 the teams tied 31-31. The Tritons (12-10-1) are led by quarterback Kirra Calvijo (67 scoring passes) while Troy (16-3-3) is riding a 15-game unbeaten streak.

Next at 11:15 a.m. will be the Division 4 final between Fullerton (18-6) and Ocean League champion Santa Monica (13-6) while Antelope Valley (12-6) will play Northview (12-8) for the Division 5 title at 1 p.m. The Division 2 final between Northwood (18-6) and Trabuco Hills (17-3) at 2:45 p.m. could be a high-scoring affair.

Championship Saturday also includes a No. 1 versus No. 2 clash to decide the Southern Section Division 1 crown in girls’ volleyball at Cerritos College. No. 1-seeded Sierra Canyon (32-4) takes on defending champion Mater Dei (34-4) at 7 p.m. after both schools won their respective four-team pools.

The Trinity League champions downed Sierra Canyon 2-0 at the Durango Fall Classic in September and are paced by USC commit Layli Ostovar and Orange Lutheran transfer Westley Matavao. The Mission League champion Trailblazers counter with Florida A&M-bound Brandi Boston and University of San Diego-bound Lauren Lynch.

Earlier at Cerritos College, Palos Verdes (23-8) will try to capture its first section title when it takes on Murrieta Valley (27-7) in the Division 2 final at 12:30 p.m., followed by the Division 3 matchup between Bishop Diego (26-7) and Long Beach Poly (27-12) at 3 p.m. Bell Gardens (18-18) and Garden Grove (17-19) meet in the Division 8 final at 10 a.m.

The top two seeds will also meet for the City Section Open Division girls’ volleyball title at 6 p.m. at Cal State Northridge. West Valley League champion Taft, the No. 1 seed, is seeking its sixth City title but its first in the Open Division. Western League champion and second-seeded Venice (35-4) is vying for its fourth City crown and second in the Open Division. The teams did not meet in the regular season. Taft (39-7) is unbeaten versus City opponents.

LACES (18-13) faces Western League rival University (21-14-2) for the Division I crown at 3:15 p.m.

From July-August last year, I was in Australia and New Zealand covering Spain’s Women’s World Cup win — and the scandal that followed when the country’s now-disgraced federation president Luis Rubiales gave striker Jenni Hermoso an unsolicited kiss.

From months before the tournament to returning to my home in Barcelona, the experience was surreal. A new Netflix documentary called #SeAcabó: Diario de las campeonas (It’s All Over: The Kiss That Changed Spanish Football) made me relive the calm before the storm I experienced at La Roja’s base in Palmerston North, New Zealand, and the frustration that followed.

It’s worth remembering the turbulence of Spain’s World Cup preparations. When their squad was announced, it didn’t include some of the game’s best players. Fifteen internationals had declared themselves ineligible for mental health reasons until the federation (RFEF) made changes to the way it treated women’s football. Some players went to the World Cup after a nine-month absence from the national team.

There were many internal divisions: between ‘Las 15’, as the players who had sent emails declaring themselves ineligible became known in the media, and others who did not. And also between those who sent the email and decided to go to the tournament anyway, and those who did not.

You would think that climate would make it impossible to win anything but, strangely enough, the opposite happened. Spain made history by winning a knockout game in a major competition for the first time — and went all the way to the final, where they beat England 1-0.

But that was just the beginning. After full time, coach Jorge Vilda pointed to Rubiales in the stands, who responded by grabbing his crotch and pointing to Vilda, as if the success was theirs alone. That ignored the fact this was an exceptional generation and showed the players had been right to say that people did not believe in them. It was disrespectful to everyone, including England’s Lionesses.

Then came Rubiales’ kiss on Hermoso, his non-apology, the pressure on Hermoso to downplay the seriousness of the incident in a proposed video with him, and a speech from Rubiales in which he blamed “false feminism” for how he had been treated and repeated “I’m not going to resign” five times.

Rubiales eventually resigned 21 days after the final following a provisional sanction from world governing body FIFA (it then banned him from football for three years). The legal case over the kiss continues, with Spanish prosecutors seeking a two-and-a-half year prison sentence for him, consisting of a one-year sentence for a charge of alleged sexual assault and a further one-and-a-half years for alleged coercion. The trial will start on February 3 next year.

Rubiales has always claimed Hermoso gave consent for him to kiss her. Hermoso has testified the kiss was not consensual and that attempts were made to force her into saying the opposite. Various Spanish outlets reported that Rubiales denied coercing Hermoso in his testimony before a judge in September last year.

Rubiales will stand trial in February next year (Alberto Gardin/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

The main focus of the documentary is on Alexia Putellas, Hermoso and Irene Paredes. Aitana Bonmati, Laia Codina, Teresa Abelleira, Ivana Andres, Sandra Panos, Olga Carmona and Lola Gallardo also feature.

It goes in chronological order from before those 15 emails were sent, explaining how, even after the 2022 European Championship in England, this talented generation felt as if they were being wasted and that Vilda was not giving them solutions when games were not going well.

As The Athletic has reported, and the players discuss in the documentary, Vilda asked them to leave the door to their hotel rooms open until midnight. He stopped them at points to ask them to show them the inside of their bags — to see if they had bought anything. They reproached him for what they perceived as lazy coaching and a lack of professionalism in training.

In a press conference in September 2022, after he had omitted the 15 players from his squad, Vilda said: “I challenge anyone to come out and say there hasn’t been respect or that there’s been a bad mark in my behaviour with them (the players) in all my career.”

The players say in the documentary that Paredes spoke to Vilda and Rubiales in August 2022 to explain the players’ feelings, and the full conversation was leaked a few days later in the press.

“I was shocked because that conversation was only between me and him (Rubiales),” Paredes explains in the documentary. “He went after us.”

In many stories at the time, Paredes was portrayed as the instigator of a campaign against Vilda. She gave a press conference on September 1 with Guijarro and Hermoso — alongside Vilda — in which they explained they only wanted basic improvements.

“Between games, we were travelling five hours by bus,” Paredes says in the documentary. “We didn’t have our own dressing room. We couldn’t use the gym, the only one we had, because it belonged to the boys, even if they weren’t there. It was a lot of things.”

The documentary details another national team training camp in September 2022. Following the first lunch, all the players were gathered by Vilda. Chairs were put in a circle and the women were encouraged to air their concerns, according to everyone interviewed in the documentary. The Barca contingent was the most vocal at that meeting, and this is where the division between players started.

Vilda after the World Cup final (Joe Prior/Visionhaus via Getty Images)

Those who later declared themselves ineligible, such as Bonmati, felt everything had been said unanimously by the players — but were then disappointed by how others didn’t speak up or contradicted them in the meeting.

“We were asked if we wanted to continue defending that shirt,” says Abelleira. “You were in front of someone who was going to decide whether to call you up or not depending on what we said.”

“In that meeting, I had something inside, I was telling myself that I had to speak up,” Ivana Andres, who was Spain’s captain for the World Cup, says. “But there were very radical positions (being taken) that said they couldn’t take it any more and I thought it was a very high price to pay and I didn’t want to miss a World Cup. In the end, I finished that meeting and I didn’t speak.”

“I was in a very different position to the rest of my team-mates because I had been in the national team for less time,” Carmona adds.

“I feel bad that they all couldn’t say what they felt because we all had the same opinion,” Bonmati says.

“I understood that meeting (was used) as a way of dividing us further,” Paredes says.

It is the first time the players have publicly expressed the divisions that existed within the group. We see how temporary bridges were built between the players and the RFEF — which gave them the minimum guarantees so they would go to the World Cup.

But we also see how Panos was excluded by Vilda despite being the starting goalkeeper for the reigning Spanish and European champions, Barca. Panos says she sent an email asking Vilda to come back for the World Cup and never received a response. Vilda then told a press conference that she had not been called up for sporting reasons.

But what moved me the most — and what makes the documentary so important — is how the aftermath of the kiss on Hermoso is shown.

In a moment of maximum euphoria, at the peak of happiness in her sporting career, having achieved something she thought would never happen, Hermoso stood on the stage to be given her winner’s medal. Rubiales took full advantage of that moment of weakness to ruin it forever, kissing her on the lips.

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In Hermoso’s head, something started to feel wrong. She was happy about the win, but something wasn’t right. Putellas and Paredes say Hermoso approached them to tell them about the kiss, looking for someone to tell her if it was right or wrong.

Hermoso is always the dressing-room joker, the one who is always in a good mood, the DJ, the one who makes her colleagues laugh. In the adrenaline of the moment, Putellas says she thought Hermoso was joking when she said Rubiales had kissed her.

The striker didn’t get the answers she was looking for at first and opted to say no more and keep celebrating — nobody wants to be the party pooper when you have won a World Cup. Then some of the players began to echo what had happened in a live broadcast on social media.

“Who kissed?,” goalkeeper Misa Rodriguez asked during the celebrations, as captured in a live stream from the time.

“Eh, but I didn’t like it,” Hermoso responded, still celebrating but making clear it wasn’t about her. “And what do I do? Look at me, just look at me (in that moment).”

During the celebrations, Rubiales went down to the dressing room. He came in, made jokes, said they all had a trip to Ibiza paid for when they returned from the tournament and that his wedding to Hermoso would take place there, as multiple videos from the players’ live streams showed. Thinking it was all a joke, the players celebrated. Rubiales went to grab Hermoso to recreate the image of a bride and groom at a wedding, while she made a face of clear discomfort.

The jokes continued until Paredes came down from the World Cup cloud and warned the others. “Girls, this is serious,” she said, as she details in the documentary.

Hermoso was awarded the Socrates Award at the recent Ballon d’Or ceremony for her humanitarian efforts (Jose Breton/Pics Action/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The different recordings and testimonies show the different phases Hermoso went through.

According to the documentary, a pivotal moment for Hermoso came in Ibiza. While the team were enjoying a well-deserved holiday as world champions, Hermoso and the players who accompanied her describe how she went through hell, as she felt she was put under pressure by the RFEF to make a statement saying everything was fine.

As Hermoso, Bonmati and Andres describe, Rubiales tried to pressure her on the plane home from the World Cup, attempting to record a video first with her and then with one of the captains to say everything was fine. Bonmati says she was even asked to appear on TV to reduce tensions, but they all refused.

“Rubiales, Jenni and I had a chat,” Codina says. “He told us that he was meeting a woman and that this woman had spoken to him and told him that nothing was wrong with the kiss, that she should just make the video and that was it.”

The pressure increased. Hermoso received messages from then-national team director and former Newcastle United striker Albert Luque saying that Rubiales didn’t deserve that and that she should take a stand. Those are messages the player herself shows in the documentary, including ones sent to a friend of hers when Hermoso stopped responding.

Prosecutors are seeking a one-and-a-half-year sentence for Luque for the charge of alleged coercion. He denied coercing Hermoso when he testified as a defendant in the Rubiales case in October 2023, according to several Spanish media reports, but admitted to having sent her messages.

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Rubiales: Prosecutors seeking two-and-a-half-year prison sentence for ex-RFEF president

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“They told me that it wasn’t going to stay like this,” Hermoso explains to Putellas and Paredes. “Threats. There came a point when I was walking and I had to turn around and look. I was afraid.”

Hermoso says the RFEF’s marketing director, Ruben Rivera, told her to call the federation’s integrity department to say “nothing” had happened. She says: “I didn’t want to, I didn’t know what I was signing”. Prosecutors are also looking to charge Rivera for alleged coercion. In March, he told radio station Cadena SER, “I have never coerced anyone in my life”.

While Hermoso was in Ibiza, Putellas and the other players told her it was better not to think about it, telling her to disconnect and enjoy the holiday. Then, Hermoso started crying.

“When I found out about everything in Ibiza, I felt terrible,” Putellas says. “You were telling us without saying it directly: ‘Help me’. And we were like, forcing you to think that nothing was happening, to say: ‘Forget about it, you’ve had a great World Cup, celebrate’.”

Hermoso faced harassment on social media. When she left her house, photos of her were posted on the internet with comments asking how things could be so bad if she was going for an ice cream.

The most striking thing about the documentary is that many women, to a greater or lesser extent, may identify with what happened to Hermoso. That goes beyond football, her or Rubiales.

What Hermoso goes through, from the time the medal is hung around her neck until she makes a complaint, is perceived in the documentary as a typical pattern of a woman who has been harassed by her superior at work. You convince yourself that everything is fine and try to continue celebrating, then you break down and cry because you realise that the best day of your life has been tarnished forever.

But it also shows that there are many friends like Putellas and Paredes ready to help someone fight. To help them say “It’s over — se acabó”.

(Top photo: Putellas, Hermoso and Paredes lift the World Cup; Jose Breton/Pics Action/NurPhoto via Getty Images)