The Caitlin Clark phenomenon is nothing new to me, thanks to America and the Catholic Church

I first saw Caitlin Clark play basketball in the 1970s.

Well, it wasn’t Clark herself. The women’s basketball phenomenon, 22, hadn’t been born yet. But I saw female players exactly like her - tough, talented, and grounded in spiritual values.

This was because I grew up in a Catholic family in Maryland, went to Catholic schools, and participated in and watched the Catholic Youth Organization.

The CYO, founded in 1930 by Bishop Bernard Sheil, was our version of organized sports. Decades before Caitlin Clark and the WNBA, I saw fantastic female athletes competing in the gyms throughout the archdiocese. My older sister played on a basketball team for Our Lady of Mercy, a school known at the time for its brilliant head coach, a woman named Susan. The girls' games regularly drew bigger crowds than the boys'.

In fact, the Catholic Church was far ahead of American liberals when it came to women in sports.

We Catholic children didn’t have to read Betty Friedan or take a course in the history of feminism to see equality. It was right in front of us every week on the hardwood.

I’m not a political liberal and don’t need consciousness-raising sessions to be taught what I learned from the time I was a boy — women are great athletes and always have been. In the early 1970s, Philadelphia’s Immaculata University “won the first three de facto national women’s basketball championships,” the New York Times once reported. The University of Notre Dame’s women's team has appeared in five title games since 2011, winning the national championship in 2018.

My first physical education teacher at Our Lady of Mercy in the 1970s was a woman.

My grandfather, Joe Judge, was a professional baseball player for the Washington Nationals in the 1920s. His father had come to America from Ireland for a better life and to escape the lingering repression against Catholics by the British in Ireland. So sports and faith have always been central to my life.

It’s no surprise to me that Clark, similar to all the children I went to school with, is a Catholic. It’s clear from the way she carries herself that the spiritual values we learned as children inform her worldview and integrity.

Clark, a native of Des Moines, is a parishioner at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in West Des Moines. She went to elementary school at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School and then to Dowling Catholic High.

“We get to live our faith every day. Dowling starts every day with prayer and ends every day with prayer. This is a big reason why Dowling has such a special culture and is such a special place to go to school,” Clark told the Des Moines Register in 2018.

While in Jesuit high school at Georgetown Preparatory School in the 1980s, I played football, baseball, and tennis. My sister and my female friends played basketball, tennis, soccer, and field hockey. It always struck me as odd when I would see young athletes depicted in movies and other popular culture as male jocks while the girls were always kind of passively attending classes and going on dates. These were not the girls we knew.

At one point, we got into a prank war with an all-girls school. We toilet-papered a couple of their houses. They responded by, in the middle of the night, uprooting a Metro bus sign and then replanting it in the front yard of one of my classmates. These girls were not to be messed with. They still aren’t.

Villanova University’s president, Peter M. Donohue, recently talked about how faith informs the school's sports programs.

“Our Augustinian values are a part of how our coaches lead, how our student-athletes compete, and how our fans come together to support the Wildcats,” Father Donohue told the Jesuit magazine America. “Each year, our student-athletes and coaches sign ‘The Foundation,’ pledging their commitment to the university’s values of veritas, unitas, and Caritas (truth, unity, and love). The pledge is a symbol of why they are at Villanova, what they are part of, and that they are committed to something bigger than themselves.”

We were way ahead of our time.

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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.