Gabbie Marshall and Caitlin Clark: multiple times previous Iowa couple demonstrated their endearing kinship ft. WNBA draft in 2024
The Iowa women’s basketball team loses the national championship, ending the illustrious careers of Kate Martin and Gabbie Marshall.
Despite the fact that guards Gabbie Marshall and Kate Martin never won a national championship, their contributions to the Iowa women’s basketball team while they wore the black and gold will always be remembered. Although Marshall and Martin played their final game as Hawkeyes, a 87-75 defeat to South Carolina in the NCAA Tournament’s championship game, their legacy will remain the standard for what it means to be an Iowa women’s basketball player. Following Iowa’s defeat on Sunday evening, Sydney Affolter said, in an emotional tone, “They are both great leaders.” “I think what a many individuals detract from them is simply to give all you can to make this group win, and I think they [did] that consistently.” Marshall and Martin ought to figuratively serve as the pillars of a statue of fellow senior Caitlin Clark outside of Carver-Hawkeye Arena. The trio’s on-court chemistry made Iowa women’s basketball a must-see show on television and led to the program’s greatest success in its 50-year history. In the press conference that followed the game, Clark stated,
“There have been so many great Iowa women’s basketball players to come before us that allowed this program to be really good.” I think we elevated it to a whole new level. The future of our program looks promising to me. In her most recent appearance for Iowa, Martin scored 16 points and grabbed five rebounds, while Marshall, an outstanding defensive player, scored six points and had three steals.
The two players gave it their all on the court, playing the entire forty minutes against a formidable South Carolina team that won the season with a perfect 38-0 record. With 166 and 163 games, respectively, Marshall and Martin end their careers with the most appearances in Iowa women’s basketball history. Since the 2020-21 season, Clark and the two have started nearly every game. During this time, they’ve become as much a part of Carver as the iconic Carver Cones or PA announcer Dave Gallagher’s booming voice. Marshall said with tears in her eyes, “We’ve been together for so long through the ups and downs and everything in between.
” “We’ve done basically everything together for these most recent five years, and I will have them in my day to day existence until the end of time.” Martin showed up nearby in the mid year of 2018, and Marshall joined her a year after the fact. The two have witnessed the rise in the Iowa women’s team’s and the sport as a whole’s popularity since then. Iowa progressed to its very first public title in 2023, what broke the record for the most-seen ladies’ school ball game with 9.9 million watchers. By playing in the first basketball game ever held in Kinnick Stadium in front of more than 55,000 fans and setting or breaking attendance records in all but two of its regular season games, Iowa somehow managed to surpass that record this season. In addition, the team beat the previous record for viewers in two of their last three NCAA Tournament games against LSU and UConn, and this year’s national championship is likely to extend this run. Marshall stated, “I think that’s kind of where the emotion is coming from, just thinking of everything we’ve done together from the Kinnick game until now.
” “We’ve made history here together, and we’ve gotten to be the first to do things at the University of Iowa.” Martin stated that it was her goal to spend as much time as possible with her teammates, and she achieved that goal despite the fact that this year would be their last at Iowa. The group’s title win in the Large Ten Competition and coming to the public title implied the Hawkeyes played in the greatest measure of games assigned. “I don’t believe this should be finished, and it stings downright horrendous realizing that this is all there is to it, and I don’t have a one year from now with Iowa,” Martin said. “However, I know it’s not over with my partners since I realize we’ll be companions forever.”
