Dorothy Gaters, legendary high school coach, weighs in on Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, state of women's game

Dorothy Gaters is retired now, 78 and chasing around a couple of great-grandsons despite a recently replaced knee, but it still gets her dander up to remember how difficult it could be in her Marshall High School heyday to get the Sun-Times to cover girls’ basketball.

“Why don’t you cover the girls more?” she’d call and ask.

Because there just isn’t much of a demand for it, she recalls being told.

Gaters — Illinois’ winningest high school basketball coach, girls’ or boys’ — won 1,153 games and 10 state championships over 45 years at Marshall. Whatever attention she and her Commandos received, they surely deserved more of it.

But just look at women’s basketball now, would you? Gaters has been enjoying — and marveling at — the sudden surge in the popularity of the women’s game.

“Now there’s a demand, isn’t there?” she said. “So let’s not cry about spilled milk. Let’s just [appreciate] what’s happening.”

Gaters has mixed opinions about the most famous women’s hooper, WNBA rookie Caitlin Clark.

“She’s obviously a phenomenal talent,” she said, “but whether she’s a generational talent, I don’t know. Is Caitlin Clark [as good as] Maya Moore? I don’t know about that. But she’s a phenomenal talent, and she got to be that good because she put in the time. I appreciate her game.”

Gaters, a Women’s Basketball Hall of Famer, has seen it all when it comes to star players. She coached 17 high school All-Americans and five players who went to the WNBA. One of them, Toni Foster, was a Big Ten player of the year and an All-American at Iowa long before Clark.

Debates are swirling around the women’s game, and most of them involve Clark. Is she as good as advertised? How real is the purported rivalry between Clark and Sky rookie Angel Reese? Are WNBA veterans out to get the ponytailed 22-year-old?

Shaking her head at some of it from afar has been Gaters, who doesn’t do the social-media thing outside of Facebook but sees more than enough arguing and squawking on that platform alone.

“People are just going to get mad,” she said. “It’s a 50-50 world. There’s always some people arguing about Michael Jordan and LeBron [James]. You’re always going to have the naysayers.

“Caitlin is definitely a great talent, but because she’s Caucasian [some will] interject the race thing. And her just being a rookie, some people want to prove she’s not that good. She’s going to have to tie her shoes up a little tighter. It’s going to be rough. I do understand the jealousy around this, how she’s been lavished with fame, lucrative contracts, all those millions. But anyone who’s mad should direct it toward the sponsors, not her.”

Gaters called the recent controversial foul against Clark by the Sky’s Chennedy Carter “unnecessary.” She’s a Sky fan, though, watching most of the games and particularly interested in the progress of Reese.

“Angel has yet to develop a lot of offensive skills away from the basket — from 8 feet, 10 feet — but she’s such an energy player,” Gaters said. “You’re going to know she’s in the game. She does the dirty work, and I appreciate her game because of that. She’s also very vociferous, but she plays hard. I wish her the best.”