Christie Sides has spent most of her life in basketball. She played on Louisiana Tech’s 1999 Final Four team, was an assistant coach for Louisiana State’s Final Four teams and spent a decade as an assistant in the WNBA.

But none of that prepared Sides for her second season as head coach of the Indiana Fever. That was when the team used the No. 1 overall pick to draft a sharpshooter from the University of Iowa named Caitlin Clark—and their entire world was turned upside down.

An early hint of how dramatically different this year would be came when the team went on an early-season road trip. Before this year, Sides says, she had never received a call on her hotel phone from a random member of the public. This season, she got a bunch of voice mails from people—“wanting to meet players, wanting tickets, wanting, you know, an autograph.”

Like any good coach confronted with an unfamiliar situation, Sides said she “made some adjustments.”

That included checking into hotels under aliases to avoid the sudden burst of outsize attention.

“Yeah, I think there’s some of us that have some fake names out there, you know, at hotels,” Sides said. “I mean, it’s crazy when you just said that, just to think about, that that’s what’s happening.”

Entering the season, the Fever were a young, rebuilding team that Sides thought would take until 2025 or 2026 to reach the playoffs. Instead, with Clark averaging more than 19 points and 8.4 assists per game—and winning WNBA rookie of the year—they made it this season. Indiana is down 0-1 to the Connecticut Sun and faces a must-win road game in a best-of-3 first-round series on Wednesday.

When the Fever started the season 1-8, a legion of mostly new fans had strong and sometimes ornery opinions about their play on the court. Sides would often trend on social media—mostly because people were calling for her to be fired.

“I’ve talked to some NFL coaches, I’ve talked to some NBA head coaches, and they’ve gone through this,” Sides said. “This has been their life for years, so they’re used to it. We didn’t have a scouting report on it, so we weren’t prepared.”

When Fever forward Aliyah Boston, the 2023 No. 1 overall pick from South Carolina, struggled at the season’s start, she was attacked on social media so relentlessly that she logged out of her accounts.

At road games, Fever fans show up by the hundreds or even thousands. (At the first playoff game, a Connecticut announcer trolled visitors by putting them on a “Bandwagon Cam” and labeling them “Fever Fan Since 2024.”)

The Fever started pulling into underground parking garages at their hotels, Sides said, rather than wade through the large crowds of people that gather in the lobby and at the front door. Players can no longer go out to eat by themselves. The Fever travel with four security guards, and “nobody leaves the hotel without a security person,” Fever general manager Lin Dunn said.

Indiana’s home arena, Gainbridge Fieldhouse, used to open an hour before games. But so many fans lined up in anticipation of games that they were spilling out into the street.

“So we had to make an executive decision to open the doors 90 minutes before the game so that we could get the people off the streets that were blocking the traffic,” Dunn said.

Once inside, fans hoovered up Fever merchandise in unheard-of quantities.

“I think by mid season, we’d already sold more merchandise up until that point than the Pacers sold the whole NBA season,” Dunn said. That team was no slouch, either: The Pacers reached the Eastern Conference finals.

The fervor around Clark started building at Iowa, where she became major-college basketball’s all-time leading scorer. Clark mania jumped to the Fever last Feb. 29, when she declared she would skip her extra year of eligibility for the Covid-19 pandemic and go to the WNBA.

Even before Indiana selected Clark No. 1 overall, an unprecedented ticket-buying frenzy ensued.

In 2022, the team played at the state-fairgrounds venue Indiana Farmers Coliseum, because their regular arena was being renovated. The Fever went a franchise-worst 5-31 that season and averaged fewer than 2,000 fans per game.

This year, Indiana drew an all-time WNBA-record 17,036 fans per game. That’s more than the 16,526 average for the 2023-24 Pacers.

“We used to play in a barn with six fans,” third-year Fever forward NaLyssa Smith marveled, a few weeks before Indiana’s May 14 season opener. “Now we’re going to be playing in sold-out arenas.”