Don’t touch that dial! The WNBA is on!

Don Coble

I sat down with a basket of wings, ready to watch the NASCAR race with my buddies last week, when Tommy asked the server to change the channel, just as we’ve done every weekend of the racing season. Just as she grabbed the remote, four men at the bar yelled.

“Hey, we’re watching this!”

We had to know what we were missing, so we looked up. It was a WNBA game. A minute later, we were watching, too.

I’ve already watched more women’s professional basketball games in the last 10 days than I watched of the NBA all previous year. And I’m not the only one.

A pair of rookies have taken the league to a new level. Chicago Sky rookie Angel Reese set the NBA record with 13 double-doubles last week, and she did it in her first 20 games of her young career. Double-doubles aren’t just the best hamburgers on the planet at In-N-Out Burger. It’s double-digit performances in two categories in a single game. In Reese’s case, it’s points and rebounds.

Another reason women are attracting bigger audiences is Caitlin Clark. The spright from Iowa is magical. Her ability to hit shots from another zip code has everyone, boys and girls, picking up a basketball.

A day before Reese made WNBA history, Clark made her history. She became the only rookie to record a triple-double with 19 points, 13 assists and 12 rebounds.

Clark’s Iowa upset Reese’s LSU in the semifinals last spring with the final score of 94-87. The game drew 12.3 million viewers, who all witnessed the beginning of one of the WNBA’s greatest rivalries.

The NCAA women’s championship game between Clark’s Iowa and South Carolina attracted 18.9 million viewers — 4.3 million more than the men’s championship game between Connecticut and Purdue a week earlier.

Clark was the first overall pick by the Indiana Fever. Reese was drafted seventh.

Reese now leads the league in rebounding, while Clark is fourth in 3-pointers made (60) and second in assists (162).

Clark and Reese have changed the way the WNBA does business. Instead of flying on commercial airlines, teams now travel on charter flights. As ratings and attendance grow, so will salaries.

Clark’s draw on the road has networks and league officials doing cartwheels. Want proof? The Atlanta Dream play their home games at the 3,500-seat Gateway Center in College Park, which is in another county, 10 miles south of the State Farm Arena, where the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks call home.

The Dream, however, had to move both games against the Fever to the State Farm Arena to handle the ticket demand. The first game, which Indiana won 91-79, drew a crowd of 17,575 fans. The next game will be on Aug. 26.

The Las Vegas Aces moved their home game against the Fever from Mandalay Bay to the larger T-Mobile Arena and sold 20,366 tickets — the largest regular-season crowd since 1999. Two nights earlier, 17,071 fans packed the Footprint Arena in Phoenix to watch Indiana beat the Mercury.

Two Fever road games have drawn crowds greater than 20,000 fans this year.

More importantly, ESPN's ratings have tripled compared to last season. A year ago, ESPN said an average of 462,000 fans watched a WNBA broadcast. This year, the number is 1.32 million, and the network doesn’t break out the games involving the Fever or the Sky.

According to CBS, an average of 2.25 million people watched the June 16 game between Indiana and Chicago — the most-watched WNBA game in 23 years.

I know four of them were sitting at the bar, and another four were eating wings, watching the game, and not thinking about NASCAR. And we'll be there for every game.