What Caitlin Clark learned from Michael Jordan and Phil Jackson on the path to stardom

Inside Lisa Bluder’s home sits a library of books, a small display for a hobby she loves. However, if you leaned in for a closer look, you’d notice that many of the books share something in common: “The Team Captain’s Leadership Manual.” “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.” “Pressure is a Privilege.”

Bluder’s books of choice brim with ideas about team development and culture.

“I just think it’s fabulous,” she said. “I just think there are so many of these good books that people can learn from out there.”

Ask her former players at Iowa, where Bluder retired in 2024 as the winningest coach in Big Ten history, and they might tell you about sitting in a circle after shootaround and listening to Bluder read a paragraph or two.

For years, she used books to help her cope with a range of challenges. However, later in her career, she encountered a situation that most leadership books couldn’t speak to: How to guide Caitlin Clark, the generational superstar who drew record-breaking crowds and massive amounts of attention.

One night at home during Clark’s junior year, Bluder’s husband, David, floated an idea.

“I think you should read ‘Sacred Hoops’ again,” he said.

Years before, when Bluder was the head coach at Drake, she had read “Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior,” Phil Jackson’s 1995 book with Hugh Delehanty, which detailed his experiences coaching Michael Jordan when they were both with the Chicago Bulls.

Bluder pulled the book from the shelf and grabbed a yellow highlighter. She began marking passages that reminded her of Clark, many of which showcased the uniquely isolating situations that come with basketball superstardom.

“The things that Michael Jordan had, that Phil had to help Michael with, were some of the same things that I feel like I had to help Caitlin with,” Bluder said.

Bluder began sharing the highlighted portions with Clark. She highlighted two passages: one about the pressure Jordan put on himself and his team, and another about handling criticism in the media. Then she would pull out the book at the team hotel on the road and hand it to Clark.

“I want you to read this portion here,” she’d say.

It wasn’t just that Clark could resonate with Jackson’s words and Jordan’s experience. She could learn from it.

Something people often got wrong about Bluder’s teams at Iowa during the Clark era was that they had a great team culture because they had Clark.

While Bluder pointed out that Clark grew to be an excellent leader, she took pride in the program’s atmosphere before she arrived. Once Clark joined the team in 2020, it unsurprisingly shook some things up.

“When she was a freshman, she didn’t really trust her teammates,” Bluder said. “She didn’t really understand them or think they worked as hard as she did, and it took time to build that up.”

Bluder immediately recognized Clark’s tendency to want to “do everything herself.” In high school, that worked. She was named the Iowa Gatorade Player of the Year twice, scoring 60 points in a game as a junior and averaging 33 points per game as a senior.

“She was always the show,” Bluder said. “She could do it by herself.”

However, Bluder knew that wouldn’t be the case in a competitive conference like the Big Ten. Collaborating with teammates didn’t come that naturally for Clark when she arrived at Iowa. Bluder noticed Clark’s body language during moments of frustration and would point it out to her when they’d watch film. She wanted to make Clark aware of the impact that had. Mostly, she knew how important it would be for Clark to bond with her teammates.

Shortly after Bluder and Clark began referencing Jackson’s book during Clark’s junior season, a situation arose that allowed Bluder to reframe the star’s thinking. Clark voiced her frustration that one of her teammates wasn’t spending enough time in the gym.

Bluder responded with a question: “Well, did you invite them to come with you to the gym?”

“Well, no,” Clark said.

Bluder let that sink in.

It was similar to a specific situation in Jackson’s book that Bluder highlighted. Jackson wrote about a private meeting with Jordan in his office, where Jackson told his star that he needed to “share the spotlight with his teammates.” In response, Jordan voiced concerns about the triangle offense Jackson ran. He wasn’t confident in his teammates’ abilities to make quick decisions, a necessary skill for the offense to execute.

Jackson asked Jordan to give his teammates a chance and assured him that he would see to it that they could be playmakers.

“Whatever you want to do,” Jordan told Jackson, “I’m behind you.”

Jackson preached that team success hinged on synergy and mutual respect among team members. As Jackson wrote in his book and as Bluder highlighted, “Selflessness is the soul of teamwork.”

While Bluder was also a fan of the triangle offense, she felt that passage mirrored her situation with Clark for other reasons.

“The true measure of a really good player is the ability to make the people around you look good,” Bluder said. “As the best player, you have to make your team better. You have to invest in them because you’re kind of this object. ‘Oh, Caitlin Clark.’ That was what Phil tried to get Michael to do: invest in his team.”

It was one of the biggest lessons from the book that Bluder passed along to Clark. As talented as she was, she couldn’t do it all by herself.

Lisa Bluder and Caitlin Clark would sit together in the team hotel on the road and read about Michael Jordan in Phil Jackson’s book. (Keith Gillett / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

As Clark’s fame grew, new challenges popped up.

Bluder read about Jordan’s experiences with physical teams, such as the Detroit Pistons, which tried to wear him down and frustrate both him and his teammates. She marked up Jackson’s words: “The Pistons’ primary objective was to throw us off our game by raising the level of violence on the floor.”

The words resonated. As a sophomore, Clark became the first Division I player to lead the nation in points and assists per game in a single season. She averaged 27.8 points per game as a junior and raised that to 31.6 per game as a senior, her deep range drawing comparisons to Steph Curry.

“If they couldn’t defend her, it was like, ‘Let’s just impose a physical will against her and try to get her baited to lose her temper,’ ” Bluder said. “Or do something to get her out of her game mentally.”

Bluder showed Clark this passage from Jackson’s book and reminded her not to engage with the extra jabs. In particular, Bluder liked Jackson’s phrase “peaceful warrior.”

“If you engage,” Bluder told Clark, “people are going to remember that about you.”

Another challenge that arose was the demands on Clark’s time. Before games, after games, whether it was wins or losses, everyone wanted to hear from Clark.

“It’s fun to do once in a while,” Bluder said, “but if you have to do it every single day and once or twice a day, it gets old and that’s hard.”

Bluder saw both sides. “There can be jealousy from the other players that they’re not getting involved in it,” she said. After reading through sections in Jackson’s book that touched on this, Bluder reminded Clark of what Jordan went through.

“Caitlin,” she said, “you have to do the brunt of this. So did Michael. The great ones do.”

And she reminded Clark to “make sure that you’re not talking about yourself. Make sure you’re talking about a teammate. If you can’t bring a teammate along physically, you can bring a teammate along by the way you speak about them.”

Jackson believed Jordan’s “celebrity status” isolated him in specific ways from his teammates, making it more difficult for him to be the kind of leader the team needed.

To compensate, he created rituals for his team, such as “The Circle of Trust,” where Bulls players gathered in a circle before games to share anything on their minds.

“That, to me, is the most important thing with ‘Sacred Hoops,’” Bluder said. “It was Michael Jordan, but it was also this great team around him.”

Years before Clark arrived at Iowa, Bluder had incorporated her own “Circle Time” before and after practices. It was a time for them to share, manifest, connect and listen. However, it became significant for Clark and her teammates. They grew closer and “understood each other,” Bluder said. So when teams were physical with Clark, it became personal.

“Our circle, we were so tight,” she said. “And Phil talks about that in his book, too. Teammates want to protect Caitlin. I mean, they were going to protect Caitlin. And then you’ve really got something special.”

After the Final Four last year, Clark walked into a room with Bluder and teammate Hannah Stuelke. Clark and the Hawkeyes had just beaten UConn by two points to advance to the national championship game, but it wasn’t one of Clark’s signature performances.

She made 7 of 18 shots and scored 21 points, tied for her lowest total all season. Yet when she sat down and looked at the room full of reporters, she had a slight smile on her face that only grew bigger when she heard the first question, which was geared toward Stuelke, sitting to her left.

“Hannah is tremendous,” Clark said. “Tonight, she played with an energy about herself. She could really go in there and dominate.”

For the next 15 minutes, she kept the praise going, both for Stuelke and her other teammates. She called Kate Martin a “pro player” and singled out Gabbie Marshall’s defensive plays and responsiveness. At one point, her smile faded, and she became a little more stern.

“Everybody is stepping up,” Clark said. “It’s not just me, it’s not just one player. That’s not what this is. We wouldn’t be at this point right now if it was just one player.”

Bluder, sitting to Clark’s right, nodded in agreement.

Then Clark added:

“I think that’s one of the greatest ways our program has evolved over the course of me being here. I used to feel like I had to do everything, and now I have so much trust in my teammates, and my teammates have so much trust in me. I just knew they were going to make plays down the stretch.”

Bluder calls it one of her proudest leadership moments from her star. Clark’s response and mindset were precisely what they had often discussed, what they had talked about when reading Jackson’s book and dissecting the burden placed on Michael Jordan. Clark understood. She got it.