The Iowa Hawkeye Men’s Basketball team is on an improbable March Madness run, which helps, but this is still a sad week. Those guys are “the Hawks”, but the other University of Iowa Basketball team are “my Hawks.”

The week after the Christmas holidays is always a bit blue, and there’s a tinge of sadness anytime my (more or less) adult children leave after a visit. The worst week of the year for me emotionally, though, follows the end of the season for my Iowa Hawkeye Women’s Basketball Team.

I know it’s pathetic, maybe even a bit creepy, for a grown man to convince himself he has a relationship with a bunch of 18-22 year old women whom he’s never met. But, that’s exactly the delusion I create every year after watching pretty much every game (even on B1G+!), scouring the internet to read every article and viewing a lot more social media posts than I’m comfortable admitting. After five plus months, I find myself totally invested in the success of not just the team, but the individual players and coaches. Then, cruelly, it ends— almost always with an unexpected loss in the national tournament.

I’m not alone. According to Nielson, the preeminent expert on measuring such things, The University of Iowa has the most popular women’s college basketball team in the country.

Most people assume that’s because of Caitlin Clark, and that’s at least partially correct. No individual player has elevated the level, and popularity, of their sport the way she has, and clearly a lot of fans who originally tuned in to watch her transcendent ability have gotten hooked and come back to watch the next generation of Hawkeyes. I think, though, that the popularity of women’s basketball at its flagship university also has a lot to do with Iowans.

Girls high school sports in Iowa are an important part of the state’s identity. The state basketball tournament, far from an afterthought, often outdraws the boys’ version and local television ratings are similar for the two events. Iowa is the only state in the country with a separate athletic association dedicated to administering girls’ high school sports. (Other states have a single organization responsible for administering both girls and boys athletics at the high school level.) The Iowa High School Girls Athletic Union was formed in 1925 at the insistence of the smaller schools in the state who refused to bow to the “big city” view at the time that sports were harmful to young women. A century later, the structure remains.

Having a separate organization dedicated to supporting and promoting girls athletics has created the type of culture that incubates a lot more world-class athletes than you’d expect from a state of 3 million people. The same goes for leaders. In th Big 10 Conference alone, the head women’s basketball coaches at Iowa (Jan Jenson- Kimballton), Wisconsin (Robin Pington – Atkins), and Maryland (Brenda Frese- Marion) all grew up in Iowa. Casting the net a bit wider to NCAA tourney teams I can think of off the top of my head, you have Jenny Baranczyk at Oklahoma (Des Moines) and Katie Abrahamson-Henderson at Georgia (Cedar Rapids). That’s enormous leadership impact from a state with such a small population.

I also have a theory that every Iowa family has at least one bad-ass farmgirl great grandma who built a rim up in the hay mound with her dad so she could spend hours up there year round torturing her little brother by canning 27 foot jumpers in his face. At least that’s an image I create to help sustain me through the saddest week of the year.