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WNBA star Kate Martin has cut a niche for herself with her gritty style of play for the Golden State Valkyries. Martin was picked No. 18 overall in the 2024 WNBA Draft after four bountiful years captaining the Iowa Hawkeyes alongside the program legend, Caitlin Clark.
After Martin left Iowa for the WNBA, her longtime coach, Lisa Bluder, also retired, and her longtime assistant, Jan Jensen, took over the reins of the program. Jensen has been pictured at several WNBA arenas supporting Martin, begging the question: Are they related?
What did Jan Jensen Say About Her Relationship With Kate Martin?
Jensen is married to Julie Fitzpatrick, who is the biological aunt of Martin, making the two basketball figures related by marriage. During a February interview with “Hawkeyes Headquarters,” the Iowa coach spoke about her relationship with the Valkyries star.
“She’s (Kate Martin) my spouse’s biological niece,” Jensen said. “When she was five, she’d stay with us. But she had a dream, she put her poster above her bed in her room, looked up at the Hawkeyes poster.”
Despite not playing under Jensen as head coach, Martin was at Iowa for a period during her aunt’s 20-year tenure as associate head coach at the program under Bluder.
Jensen on Kate Martin’s Iowa Career
Martin was a three-star recruit according to ESPN, and she received plenty of DI offers, including from programs like DePaul, Illinois, and Wisconsin. When the Hawkeyes offered her, she verbally committed to them during her junior year in 2017. Martin had a stellar college basketball career, leading Iowa to three consecutive Big Ten titles while reaching the national championship game twice.
During an interview with Blake Hornstein in February, Jensen lavished praise on Martin’s stellar Iowa career.
“I think Kate was one of those players. The way she played and her humility, but also her grit, and that little glisten in her eye, that confidence, it just resonated. To see her become a star on the WNBA level, although she was a role player, I loved everything about that story,” she said.
“Because that’s life. A lot of times, if you keep plugging away, and, you know, maybe you’re not always the one with the corner office, right? But you’re the one that makes that organization work, and then if given the chance Kate is gonna kill you, right? I mean, when we played UConn last year, her little Dirk moves with the fade, her defense, and you know, in the pros when she got some minutes early, people were really connecting with her,” she added.
Martin finished her Hawkeyes career with 1,299 points, 473 assists, and 756 rebounds, while starting 139 consecutive games alongside Caitlin Clark, the longest such streak in Division I history in 25 years.
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