IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — Fans who want to be able to say they were in the arena when Caitlin Clark set the NCAA women’s career scoring record will be paying an unprecedented premium at this point.
No. 4 Iowa’s game against Michigan at Carver-Hawkeye Arena on Thursday night was trending toward being the most expensive women’s basketball ticket of all time, pro or college, according to secondary market seller TickPick.
That platform’s average ticket price was $394 on Wednesday.
Face value for Iowa women’s basketball tickets is about $15 when broken out of a season-ticket package, assistant athletic director for ticket operations Jess Rickertsen said.
Clark needs eight more points to pass Kelsey Plum as the NCAA women’s career scoring leader. She’s averaging 32 points per game this season and 28.2 for her career, so it’s safe to assume Plum’s record of 3,527 points for Washington from 2013-17 will fall against the Wolverines.
The record for most expensive women’s basketball average ticket purchase price on the secondary market entering this season was $150 for the 2022 WNBA All-Star Game, according to TickPick. Clark’s games, including Thursday’s, have exceeded that six times this season.
After Clark fell short of the scoring record in Iowa’s 82-79 loss at Nebraska on Sunday, the average for Thursday’s game swelled.
Logitix, which collects data from multiple secondary market sellers, reported the average price paid for Michigan-Iowa over the past seven days was $375. That’s up $15 from the previous week and $117 higher than the two-week period before that.
“The progressively increasing average ticket price is interesting,” Logitix spokesperson Eric Nemeth said in an email. “This is not a normal pattern unless there is building intrigue for an event.”
He noted that prices for Super Bowl tickets, for example, decrease as the day of the game gets closer.
TickPick spokesperson Will Norris said sellers can ask any price they want, so a listing Wednesday for a $65,142 end-zone seat should be taken with a grain of salt.
“In most cases like this, that ticket is not priced to sell, especially when you look at the next most expensive listing which is around $6,000,” Norris said in an email.
The overall record average purchase price probably will be smashed in less than a month. As of Wednesday, the average TickPick price was $517 for Clark’s final home game, against No. 2 Ohio State on March 3. That game could be Clark’s last one for Iowa, though she is eligible to come back for a fifth season.
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AP Sports Writer Steve Megargee contributed to this report.
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AP women’s college basketball: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-womens-college-basketball-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/womens-college-basketball
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