Episode 36 - Jeff Goldberg on the UConn Dynasty

We did our first interview. That is the headline of this one for us, and honestly we were nervous about it in a way we have not been nervous about the show in a while. There is a learning curve to hosting a conversation instead of just talking to each other, and we found it in real time, mostly in the form of trying to interject over a remote connection and failing.

Our guest was Jeff Goldberg, who covered UConn women’s basketball for the Hartford Courant from 2001 to 2006. As he puts it, the first 70 games he covered were all wins. He wrote two books about the program, and those books ended up being source material for The Dynasty: UConn Huskies, the Apple TV docuseries that came out a few weeks ago. Right before it premiered he wrote something we have not stopped thinking about: that women’s basketball has been so busy fighting for its future that it never learned to look after its past.

Before all that, there was a full slate of headlines to get through. A commissioner announced her retirement, Team USA played one great game and one ugly one at the World Cup, a record number of girls played high school sports, and the NWSL had a weekend that scrambled the standings from top to bottom.

Cathy Engelbert Is Out, and Nobody Is Sure What Comes Next

The WNBA commissioner announced she is stepping down at the end of the season. The contract was coming up and there was no realistic path to a renewal, so the timing was not a shock. The reaction was split down the middle between people celebrating and people bracing.

• Engelbert leaves at the end of the 2026 season.
• Nneka Ogwumike, who has led the Players Association for a decade and recently announced her retirement as a player, came up as a name. Mostly tongue in cheek, since the job answers to the owners and to the NBA, not to the players.
• The role is not a player advocacy role, but it does require someone who can build a functional relationship with players. Roger Goodell and David Stern both came up as imperfect examples of commissioners who understood that part of the job.

“First thought was, absolutely. Second thought was, they’re just going to install somebody who answers to Adam Silver.” — Alex

“My fear is that this is going to turn into a role for a middle aged white man who is really only interested in serving the whims of his boss, which is the NBA commissioner. And that is inherently going to mean that we’re going to do things only for money.” — Caitlin

Caitlin’s read is that there are already women of color in the exact leadership roles that would prepare someone for this job, at the college level and inside the NBA, many of whom played. Whether the league hires one of them is a different question from whether they are out there.

Team USA Beat China, Survived Italy, and Got Called Out Anyway

The FIBA Women’s World Cup is in Berlin, and the attendance numbers are worth pausing on. More than 160,000 tickets were sold before a single game tipped off, and that number has climbed past 217,000 since. There is real speculation that Germany is the next country where women’s basketball takes off.

On the floor, Team USA gave us two completely different games:

• Against China: 94 to 61. They shot 45% from the floor, 38% from three, and dished 26 assists. Caitlin Clark had 14 points and 11 assists with zero turnovers.
• Against Italy: ugly. Contested shots, physical play on the boards, 14 turnovers, and a night where almost nothing dropped. They won anyway.
• Kara Lawson used the postgame to praise Chelsea Gray’s late charge and Jackie Young’s physical layup, then told the group to let that be the last time somebody plays with more passion than they do. Breanna Stewart went one for nine from the floor and still pulled 11 rebounds, which was the part Lawson singled out.

“She could not buy a bucket to save her life. But my God, the woman still got 11 rebounds. She battled out there to make sure that she was doing everything. She changed shots, altered shots.” — Caitlin

The knockout rounds start this week. Quarterfinal qualifiers on Tuesday and Wednesday, quarterfinals Thursday, semifinals Saturday, final on Sunday. Only one team from each group goes home after group play, so the real tournament starts now.

3.65 Million Girls, and Flag Football Is Carrying a Lot of It

A record 3.65 million girls competed in high school sports during the 2025-26 season. That is more than 115,000 additional girls year over year, and the fifth consecutive year of growth.

For scale: in 1971, just under 300,000 girls played high school sports. Title IX passed the following year.

Flag football is the engine right now:

• Roughly 15,700 girls played in 2021. It is now over 100,000.
• The NFL is funding and backing it, and it becomes an Olympic sport in LA in 2028.
• Nebraska is the first Power Four school to field a varsity women’s flag football team, and offered 16 scholarships for this fall.

“It’s like we’ve always said. As soon as you fund it, look what happens. They show up.” — Alex

The NWSL Weekend That Broke the Top Five

Three of the top five NWSL teams lost, which is not supposed to happen with this group. Two points separate the last team into the playoffs from the first two out.

• Denver Summit blanked Gotham 3-0 at home. Gotham has four losses all season and half of them are to Denver, which completes a season sweep.
• Washington Spirit won 2-1 at Providence Park, their first ever win there, coming back from a goal down. Two of the three goals came from the penalty spot in a strangely officiated game.
• North Carolina beat the Chicago Stars 6-0. Ashley Sanchez scored a hat trick and is now on 18 goals, the most by an American in a single NWSL season, with games left to play.
• Boston Legacy upset Utah, and LA got a badly needed 2-0 win over Racing Louisville to stay in the playoff race. A few other notes from the week: Orlando parted ways with head coach Seb Hines, Rose Lavelle signed with Gotham through 2029 after reportedly aggressive offers from elsewhere, and goalkeepers keep getting involved in the attack. Kailen Sheridan assisted a Sanchez goal and Mandy McGlynn assisted a Kiana Palacios goal in Utah’s loss. That makes four goalkeeper assists this season, against a total of three before it.

Sanchez is the story to watch. USWNT roster predictions are coming and this feels less like a debate now.

“We’re going to do our US national team roster predictions next week, if it hasn’t been announced before then. Ashley Sanchez is one that we had some chatter about her before the last camp. Now, it feels undeniable.” — Caitlin

Our First Interview: Jeff Goldberg on the History Nobody Wrote Down

Goldberg’s essay before the docuseries premiere argued that women’s basketball never learned to look after its own past. He explained why he thinks that happens, and it is not a criticism of the sport.

“Women’s basketball, as an entity, officially, unofficially, spiritually, however you want to put it: everything is about where we’re going, where we’re trying to get to. And so when you’re like that, you don’t really want to take the time to stop and look back. And yet with every season that goes by, they’re creating history as they go.” — Jeff Goldberg, as discussed on the show

He walked out of the 2001 Big East final, the one Sue Bird won at the horn against Notre Dame, and told people they had just watched the greatest women’s basketball game ever played. ESPN would later call it women’s basketball’s first instant classic. His book about that single game exists because he was worried it would evaporate otherwise.

“If I hadn’t written that book, that game would be completely lost and no one would even remember it. Who even remembers the Texas team that went undefeated in 1986? People talk about UConn going undefeated in 1995. They weren’t the first ones to do it.” — Jeff Goldberg, as discussed on the show

Some of what he gave us:

• The blizzard game. December 30, 2000, Diana Taurasi’s first game against Tennessee. The governor of Connecticut went on television and told people not to drive to Hartford. Fourteen thousand showed up anyway, and the governor was sitting at center court. Taurasi hit the game winning three.
• The evil empire. Geno Auriemma called Tennessee the evil empire in 2003, and it was a Red Sox joke. He was riffing on Larry Lucchino’s line about the Yankees signing José Contreras. Every Connecticut writer in the room got the reference and laughed. Pat Summitt did not follow the Red Sox, had never seen Star Wars, and thought he was calling her program evil. It never recovered.
• The Nykesha Sales basket. In 1998, one point short of the UConn scoring record, Sales blew out her Achilles. Auriemma called Harry Perretta at Villanova, and they arranged an uncontested layup at the opening tip, then let Villanova score to even it. The backlash was enormous. Dan Patrick and Kenny Mayne delivered editorials on SportsCenter. A Courant columnist got a death threat.

“The most letters ever received at the Hartford Courant was because of Geno Auriemma letting Nykesha Sales get a free basket and then getting criticized for it.” — Jeff Goldberg, as discussed on the show

The WNBA at 30, and Where the NBA Was at 30

This was the part of the conversation that reframed something for us. Goldberg’s read on the current state of the league is a long view one, and it is not a defense of the league so much as a request for patience.

• The WNBA celebrates its 30th year next season.
• Year 30 for the NBA was 1976-77. Finals on tape delay, drug problems, racial tensions, a league going nowhere.
• Larry Bird and Magic Johnson arrived in 1979, and the NBA still did not really take off until they met in the finals in 1984.
• The women’s NCAA tournament has existed for 44 years. The first one was in 1982.
• At a comparable point in its history, the men’s tournament was in its UCLA and John Wooden era, which is roughly where UConn was in the mid 2010s.

“The women’s game is behind because it didn’t get the chance to start. NCAA tournament not till 82, WNBA not till 97. Let history unfold for them and let progress continue. They will get there. They will get there.” — Jeff Goldberg, as discussed on the show

He also floated the obvious parallel: a WNBA finals between Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese would be the league’s Larry and Magic moment. Dawn Staley said something close to the same thing in a recent interview. Let it cook.

The stories he still wants told, if anyone is taking requests: the 2001 Notre Dame season, including Muffet McGraw’s account of being booked on Flight 175 and only missing it because an assistant coach badgered her into driving to Providence instead. And a 30 for 30 on C. Vivian Stringer, who took three different programs to the Final Four and whose rivalry with UConn was as hot as anything the sport has produced.

Momentum, Setbacks, and What We’re Watching

Caitlin’s setback was a broadcast one. During Naomi Osaka’s match, commentary drifted into her mental health and used the word pouting.

“Putting your own personal opinion onto what you think a player is going through in a difficult moment is not okay. And it’s extra not okay when it is a woman who has been very brave in her openness around her own mental health journey.” — Caitlin

Momentum went to tennis. Iva Jovic beat Alexandra Eala in a three hour third round match that neither of us wanted to end, and both players earned it. Jovic gets Coco Gauff next. Alex’s momentum pick was flag football, mostly for selfish parent reasons: a way for our kids to play the sport without the tackling.

Elsewhere in the week, the WSL kicked off in England with more than half of its clubs led by women and multiple teams playing full time in their club’s top stadium. Alexia Putellas acquired the Spanish broadcast rights for one WSL match per week and launched her own YouTube channel, Eleven TV, to carry them. Unrivaled announced a bus tour to announce a tour, put New York tickets on sale before telling anyone where else they were going, and spent the rest of the week doing damage control in the replies. Olivia Miles took Rookie of the Month for the fourth straight time, A’ja Wilson took Player of the Month, and the WPBL playoffs are set with Denae Benites and Kelsie Whitmore tied at 11 home runs.

What We Keep Thinking About

The part of the interview that stuck with us is how much of this comes down to luck. The 2001 Big East final gets remembered because one guy in the building thought it mattered enough to write a book about it a decade later. The Texas team that went undefeated in 1986 got no such guy, which is why most people believe UConn did it first. Nothing about which stories survive is automatic, and the sport is currently generating history faster than anyone is writing it down.

That is a better problem to have than the one women’s basketball had 30 years ago, and it is still a problem. So go watch the docuseries. Read the books if you get the chance. And if you came to this sport in the last five years like Alex did, it is worth knowing what happened before you got here.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

Full Transcript Transcript is computer generated and may contain errors.

Cold Open

Jeff Goldberg: They’re saying, well, you must be so ecstatic that you’re not around him anymore, that you don’t have to deal with that asshole anymore. I would look at them like they had three heads. That was the greatest five years I’ll ever have.

Intro: Our First Interview

Caitlin: Hi, I’m Caitlin.

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex.

Caitlin: And this is Raising the Game, a women’s sports podcast covering primetime performers, the business behind the athletes and the leagues, and what the growth of women’s sports means for the next generation of women’s athletes.

Alex: Episode 36. And I think we’re both really excited for this one.

Caitlin: Yes.

Alex: Something brand new for our show. We had an interview.

Caitlin: Yeah, we are going to be sharing our first interview with all of our listeners today. This was a great opportunity that came to us a few weeks ago. We’ll talk a little bit more about who and what it’s about, but as Alex and I have discussed the show and where we would love to see it go, interviewing guests was definitely something high on the list of an opportunity we wanted to have.

Alex: It was way more fun than I thought it was gonna be.

Caitlin: Yeah, it was really fun to have this conversation. We do hope you enjoy it as well. But also the learning curve for us, figuring out, how do you facilitate a good conversation and give the guest opportunity to share their experience and their stories, while also making sure that we’re staying in line with some of the things that are important to us.

Alex: I think the cool thing, or the funny thing, is that we’re all used to remote calls and Teams calls and how sometimes it doesn’t work as well over the internet. I had a reintroduction to that on air with this, which felt kind of different, so I thought it was kind of funny.

Caitlin: Yes, you definitely have the lag in audio where someone’s trying to interject, but it doesn’t come across, and then whatever.

Alex: Then they’re halfway down a story.

Caitlin: You have kids coming into the room while you’re interviewing a guest, because we’re a mom and dad doing a sports podcast shortly after we try to put our kids to bed. Here we are. But that’s gonna be the majority of our episode content today. Obviously, before we get into that, we’ll do our normal headlines. There are a few things in the women’s sports world right now that we wanna cover off on. And then we’ll leave you with a little what to watch, momentum, setbacks, all that good stuff.

Alex: Yeah, all the normal stuff.

Caitlin: All that good stuff.

Alex: Make sure, click all the buttons. It feels weird, it feels like I say that every night, but it’s only every week. But I have to keep saying it. Just keep clicking all the buttons. It’s fun to keep seeing more and more people engage with us.

Caitlin: Yes. And share, share, share with your friends. Even if you think they may not be super into women’s sports. We try to angle for the newer sports fan, or people who may know about one league but can get a little bit of information about others. A friend of mine is a big soccer head and has started following the WNBA because of hearing about it more on our podcast. That can happen to you and your friends too. Share our podcast.

Alex: There you go.

Caitlin: Self-promotion is hard for us.

Alex: It really is. All right. Favorite thing.

Favorite Things: Second Grade and a Three-Hour Tennis Match

Caitlin: So I would say, besides the interview, because that was really cool, and again, I’ll share a little bit more about that once we get to introducing our guest, it was probably our oldest starting school.

Alex: Yeah. Second grade.

Caitlin: It’s kind of not favorite thing, kind of favorite thing, but she’s just so giddy about getting back into school. She’s been reading non-stop.

Alex: It’s like crazy.

Caitlin: She reads more than I do, and I read a lot. So that’s pretty cool. I think the other thing is we got to do a solo trip to the Great Minnesota Get Together. Last time we talked to you, we had gone with our family, and it’s a very different experience.

Alex: A lot easier when it’s just the two of us.

Caitlin: So, recommend. Well, do it however you want.

Alex: Yeah. I think my favorite thing was, was it last night we watched Jovic versus Eala?

Caitlin: Jovic, yeah.

Alex: Jovic, sorry, still getting the names down.

Caitlin: That’s okay.

Alex: It was fun. It was three hours.

Caitlin: Oh my gosh, a marathon. I was gonna talk about it a little bit in the headlines.

Alex: Back and forth, yeah. It was really fun to watch those two go at it. It felt like it could have gone either way at that point still, at the three hour mark.

Caitlin: I have a few things to say, but I’ll save it for when we’re doing our US Open updates, because it was a really, really good tennis match. All right. Speaking of headlines, let’s dive in.

Jordan Chiles Sets Her Sights on the 2028 LA Olympics

Alex: Jordan Chiles announces she’s aiming to compete at the 2028 Olympics in LA.

Caitlin: I think her announcement video took the social media world by storm. She had a custom grill from Paul Wall that says LA 28. Paul Wall’s coming back, I’m not gonna lie. And Jordan, she’s got style, she’s got flair, she’s throwing it out there, so that’s pretty exciting. Obviously she had maybe a little bit of a disappointing, well, she was great in Paris, but didn’t get the medal she was supposed to get. She was supposed to get the bronze and that went to arbitration. I don’t even know where that’s at right now, how that ended up. So it’ll be cool to see her. Obviously she still has to qualify, make Team USA, but exciting stuff.

US Open: Osaka, Townsend, Gauff, Jovic and Eala

Alex: US Open action heads into the quarterfinals, with semifinals scheduled for the day of release of this episode.

Caitlin: Yeah, so obviously the tournament moves fast. We’re finishing out round of 16 play tomorrow, and then quarterfinals will start right before we air this episode. A couple of highlights. Naomi Osaka as of right now is still in it. She’s been rocking the tunnel fits and the entry outfits, doing some nods to different sports icons. She did a little Allen Iverson nod, and I heard that the one she wore last night was a nod to Becky Hammon in her blazer with the hoodie.

Alex: With the hoodie, yep.

Caitlin: Classic. So fun to see her play and see her continuing to get back into form after she’s had various breaks recently in her career.

You had American Taylor Townsend, who’s also storming into the spotlight. She challenged Aryna Sabalenka, failed to move past her, but I think still gave her hell. She also had a crazy tunnel fit. It was awesome. One of the things I love about tennis, and we see this in the W too, is the expressiveness from the fashion side when these players are coming out. I think that’s really cool. You get a flavor for who they are, the personalities.

Coco Gauff right now has been on a tear. She just won the Cincinnati Open. She awaits Jovic in the round of 16.

Jovic, an 18-year-old from California, took, as Alex mentioned, Alexandra Eala, the Filipina tennis star. She’s a superstar in the Philippines. And like you said, a three and a half hour marathon match. It was one of those matches where we were watching and I’m like, I can’t decide who I want to win this. They’re both playing so well. They’re both digging. The momentum was back and forth.

Really good series of hitting. One of the announcers, I can’t remember who said it, said these two are so young, Eala is 21, just wait a few more years. And one of the things I noticed was neither one of them has a particularly powerful serve. If you could really get that nailed down, they already have so much of that foundation. They’re gonna be fun to watch for years to come.

Eala is also just coming off of a major tournament win in DC, the DC Open a month or so ago. And we are big Alex Eala fans now, along with all of our Filipino listeners.

Alex: We got a boost in subscribers last time we mentioned her, so big ups.

Caitlin: And we love watching her play. The fight, again, from both her and Jovic. It’s also cool, her and Jovic are doubles partners.

Alex: Oh.

Caitlin: So they know each other’s games really, really well, and you could see the gamesmanship that was playing out, obviously in addition to the endurance. I don’t know how tennis players do that sometimes when it goes so long, but really fun to watch.

And then earlier this evening, Jessica Pegula, American, won her match against Romanian Sorana Cîrstea, and she advances to the quarterfinals on Tuesday as well. So you have a lot of Americans still in, which is always fun in the US Open, because you’ve got the hometown fans. And so we’ll see how things go.

Alex: See where it goes.

A Record 3.65 Million Girls in High School Sports

Alex: A record breaking 3.65 million girls competed in high school sports during the 2025-26 season.

Caitlin: This is huge. There’s a couple of different growth figures that I’m gonna talk about here. Over 115,000 more girls playing sports year over year, so from this previous season to now, which is amazing. We’ve talked so many times on this podcast about the importance of participation in sports for young girls, and boys too, honestly, but specifically for women, how that translates directly into career success, success after sport, those kinds of things. And so seeing that number and that amount of opportunity for these young girls going up makes me super happy. This is the fifth straight year that participation has increased, so since 2021, which is great to see.

And then flag football has burst onto the scene, and that has really grown as we start to mainstream it. It’s getting a bunch of backing and funding from the NFL. It has gotten a little bit more legitimized as it’s becoming an Olympic sport in 2028 in LA. But it’s leading the surge, going from 15,700 girls in 2021 when it first started to now over 100,000, which is really cool.

And what I love about it, just as a little extra fun fact, is there’s opportunity growing beyond high school for flag football. We’ve talked about this before too. I read an article this week about Nebraska, which is the first Power Four conference school to have a varsity women’s flag football team. They offered 16 scholarships for their flag football team for this fall, which is pretty cool.

Last thing I’m going to share here is just to bring it back to what Alex said. 3.65 million girls participating. In 1971, taking us back 55 years, we had just under 300,000 girls participating in high school sports. What happened right after 1971? Title IX.

Alex: Title IX.

Caitlin: Title IX was passed, and so we would be remiss not to call out the importance of that legislation in opening the door for these opportunities for participation by all of these girls. So huge thank you to Patsy Mink and others who voted for that.

Alex: I think it’s interesting that the NFL’s putting money behind the flag football part. It’s like we’ve always said, as soon as you fund it, look what happens.

Caitlin: They show up. There it is. They show up.

A Wild NWSL Weekend and a Tight Playoff Race

Alex: A wild weekend in the NWSL, with three of the top five falling and two points separating the last team into the playoffs, LA, and the first two out, Seattle and Denver.

Caitlin: Yeah, so I’m going to run us through a few scenarios. There’s still some games being played right now. We may do some live score checking here, maybe you can pull it up while I’m going through these first ones.

So we had, like Alex said, three of the top five teams lose. We just talked last week about how a lot of those teams are actually hard to beat, like they tend to get to a draw or win. But Denver, our good old Denver Summit, went out and blanked Gotham 3-0 at home. Gotham, y’all, Gotham has four losses on the entire season. Half of those are to the Denver Summit. So ridiculous. Season sweep for the Summit over Gotham.

We just watched this afternoon, Washington Spirit beat Portland at Providence Park. They have never won at Providence Park before. They won 2-1, coming back from being one-nil down. Two of the three goals in that game were from the PK spot. The refereeing in that game was weird.

Alex: A little bit weird.

Caitlin: To be honest with you. North Carolina blanks the Chicago Stars, because why wouldn’t you? They won 6-0. Ashley Sanchez continues to tear it up. She scored a hat trick today. She is now on 18 goals for the season, which is the most by an American soccer player ever in NWSL history, with still many games to play.

Alex: I don’t think we have time for it, but I think if we talk tonight, we think she might be getting a call from someone very soon.

Caitlin: Yeah, we’re gonna do our US national team roster predictions next week, if it hasn’t been announced before then. We think it’ll come out in the next couple weeks, with those games early October. And Ashley Sanchez is one that we had some chatter about before the last camp.

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: Now, it feels undeniable, but we’ll talk about it.

Boston Legacy upset the Utah Royals, I think 3-1 or 2-1. Utah has kind of been, they’ve had a little, but it’s like the Lynx, right? You gotta get it a little bit out of your system as you get ready. They’re still very consistent. They actually last week came back and beat Orlando at Orlando, so this one feels fluky, to be honest, no offense to Boston.

And then LA got a much needed win over Racing Louisville, 2-0. That was a game that, looking at the schedule, it was like, LA, you have to win this to stay in the playoff race. And it helped them.

Big games tonight to go though, while we are recording right now. I believe these are both going on.

Alex: And we’re recording on a Sunday night because it’s the holiday. So a little bit different.

Caitlin: Yes, good call.

Alex: A little bit of lag time between recording and release.

Caitlin: So while we’re recording, San Diego is playing Seattle. This is really important and I’m gonna go through the implications of that game. And Houston is playing Orlando, which has huge implications for both of those teams as they sit right on the outside of the playoffs looking in right now.

Alex: Do you want the update on Seattle, San Diego?

Caitlin: Live update.

Alex: Live update. We’re 36 minutes in. Seattle’s winning one nil. San Diego is on a red card.

Caitlin: Oh no. Ooh, uh oh.

Alex: I don’t have info on there, but.

Caitlin: Yeah, is it in Houston and Orlando?

Alex: Yeah, I have it here. Houston is, it’s Orlando 2, Houston nil, 55 minutes in.

Caitlin: Okay, okay folks. So let’s talk about what these wins would mean. Let’s start with Seattle, San Diego. A Seattle win tonight moves them back into playoff position. They actually got moved out with LA’s win over the weekend, and it puts them two points clear of LA. So it gives them a little bit of breathing room.

If San Diego wins now, with everything that happened in those top five, it bumps them from fifth to third with one win, and puts them three points clear of the current logjam they are in with North Carolina and Utah.

If they draw, this is where it gets weird. If they draw, you actually get the same outcome for both teams. But Seattle is tied with LA for the eighth spot, which then goes down to a tiebreaker, which I’m not quite sure what the first one is. It might be head-to-head. But San Diego only goes up one point versus being three points clear.

Okay, Houston and Orlando. Both are on 26 points right now. The next team up from them is Denver at 30, and they are two spots out of playoff contention. So Houston and Orlando are in 11th and 12th, or tied for 11th. A win for either keeps them one point away from Denver, so it keeps you within striking distance. Obviously the loss keeps the losing team down there. But a draw keeps them tied and they’re still a full game behind Denver. So a draw is really not a good outcome for either of those teams. That’s gonna be really interesting.

I think we talked last week about how we’re gonna see potentially a little bit more risk taking happening because teams need points.

Alex: Yeah, yep.

Caitlin: And it’s just a matter of, can you thread that needle now? Like in Seattle, San Diego, it’s interesting with San Diego now being down a woman with the red card, and Seattle really needing this win. They might just sit back and defend, because they’re a person up, extra body, and they have the lead. Now that’s a dangerous game to play.

Alex: It is.

Caitlin: But remember we talked last week about Seattle, they were in the playoff hunt with neutral goals, four goals against. So they’re clearly good at close score games, one score games probably.

NWSL News and Notes: Seb Hines, Rose Lavelle, and Goalkeeper Assists

Caitlin: A few other news and notes from the NWSL over the week. Orlando Pride parted ways with head coach Seb Hines.

Alex: Seems to be working so far.

Caitlin: Perhaps. Hey, has Banda scored more goals? She’s gotta keep pace with Sanchez here. Also, whatever happens, we gotta watch.

Alex: Barbra Banda has one, she has a.

Caitlin: Of course she has. Of course, inevitable. We’ve said it before. Now they just need their defense to hold on.

Rose Lavelle has signed with Gotham through the 2029 season, apparently after some very aggressive offers from other teams. So she’s opted to stay, continue on building what they’re building there.

Alex: When you’ve been good, still good.

Caitlin: Right. And then I only have one of them in here, but I believe that there were two goalkeeper assists over the weekend. North Carolina Courage keeper Kailen Sheridan had an assist on an Ashley Sanchez goal during the weekday match, I believe. And then Utah’s Mandy McGlynn had an assist in Utah’s loss to Boston on a goal by Kiana Palacios. Which is zero percent surprising to me, because when we watched Utah play Denver, Mandy McGlynn can crack the crap out of a ball.

Alex: Just smacking balls down the field.

Caitlin: And they are not even punts. She’s kicking it, and we were kind of joking because she kept kicking it out of bounds, because it’s too long for her teammates to get up and control, which is not necessarily a good thing. Clearly worked out for them here.

I do think too that now with Sheridan’s, this season by itself we’ve had four goalkeeper assists in a single season, and prior to that I think there was a total of three.

Alex: Oh, all right.

Caitlin: Yeah, so our goalkeepers are doing some work. Getting some leg work in. Getting involved in that offense. I think Casey Murphy and Mackenzie Arnold are the two others who have them this year.

FIBA Women’s World Cup: Berlin, Team USA, and Kara Lawson

Alex: All right, we’re gonna do a quick dive into the FIBA World Cup.

Caitlin: We’ll take a little bit of time.

Alex: Yeah, let’s do it.

Caitlin: All right. I think something noteworthy, I was reading a little bit about speculation that Germany could be the next country where women’s basketball really flourishes and takes off. The World Cup is being played in Berlin. Apparently before any games had even tipped off, they had sold 160,000 tickets. Now these venues are a typical basketball venue of maybe 18,000. So that’s a lot.

Alex: And I think I had seen the most recent number is like 217,000.

Caitlin: It’s gone up. Gone up for sure as they’ve started.

We’re gonna talk a little bit about Team USA’s performances and then give you a sense of how the tournament is shaping up. Right now, they’re in group play. Group play will wrap up tomorrow. So tomorrow, again, Alex mentioned we’re recording on Sunday, so it’ll be Monday that group play wraps up. By the time you’re listening to this on Wednesday, there will be play-in games for the quarterfinals. Whatever they call that. The round before the quarterfinals.

Alex: They still call it the quarterfinals in FIBA, but yeah, I was like, this is like.

Caitlin: No, it’s like qualifying for the quarterfinals. It was labeled on their website. It’s quarterfinal qualifiers.

Alex: Oh, okay, okay.

Caitlin: Which is confusing. Those will be happening when you listen to this, and then the quarterfinals themselves actually start on Thursday this week.

So far through group play, we have a couple of teams that have locked up their positioning through two games into the quarterfinals. So they’re gonna be the top team in their group. And then you have teams that are still battling that could be part of those qualifying games. Now what’s interesting is once you come out of group play, only one team from each group actually gets eliminated from the tournament. The next three teams go on. It’s just a matter of where you get grouped together.

So far, I believe it’s France and the US that are the two teams that have locked up their positions in the actual quarterfinals on Thursday. And then Nigeria is the team in France’s group that has been fully eliminated from the tournament at this stage. The rest of the groups, as far as I know right now, still have some movement, but we’ll do a quick check on that here in a second.

I want to dive into Team USA’s performances. They came out on Friday and just smoked China. They came out hot. They were quite efficient from the floor.

Alex: More people in double digits.

Caitlin: Yeah, overall shot 45% from the floor, 38% from three, and beat China 94 to 61. The big thing here from my perspective is we had a huge number of assists, 26 assists in that game, and created quite a number of steals as well. But really it was shooting, and then being able to rebound reasonably well against a much larger Chinese team. And then just that diversity of scoring.

When you looked at the roster, we’ve talked about the roster the last couple episodes, it is sort of a who’s who of the all stars in the W, and I feel like that would be very hard to game plan for.

Alex: Yeah, it would.

Caitlin: So in that game, there’s also this split in the roster of, we’ll call them the national team vets. Those have been the folks who have been starting the games for Team USA. So Chelsea Gray starting at point guard, with Kahleah Copper and Jackie Young at the two other guard positions, and then Napheesa Collier with Breanna Stewart as your forwards.

And that group ended up not playing a ton in that first game, because I think head coach Kara Lawson was really, once they established this lead, eager to get the young and turnt, as they like to call themselves, crew into the game. This is also a group of players who have played together at the youth national levels for a long time. Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers, Rhyne Howard, Aliyah Boston, Sonia Citron, they’ve played together for quite some time at that youth national team level. And so they got some good minutes.

Clark had a really efficient game. 14 points, 11 assists, so a double-double. No turnovers. Led the team overall in efficiency. But then you also had Paige in double figures. She had some great steals. Honestly, her hands have been so active in this tournament, just getting deflections. They don’t always turn into steals, but I’ve noticed that, just as a sidebar. And then Rhyne Howard was four of 11 from three, which was a pretty good 36 percent.

So they got good minutes. Everybody got to play. I think that’s going to go a long way as you get deeper in the tournament, and I actually think it really benefited them as we came into Italy today, which was a completely different game.

I watched almost all of it. It was ugly basketball. Shots just were not dropping. It was a defensive game. Italy played really, I don’t know if that was exactly their game plan.

Alex: It worked, whatever.

Caitlin: Yeah, and it wasn’t like they were preventing the US from shooting, but they were contesting shots in ways that made our players have to make adjustments and made them less accurate. The other thing that they did really well was they were physical. They got up on us on the boards. I was impressed by that.

Rebounds were pretty even across the board. Italy had more turnovers. But again, I think that they forced the US into a much higher number of turnovers than the China game. They had 14 turnovers in this game. And then it was just, shots were not falling.

And it was interesting. I was showing Alex a clip earlier of head coach Kara Lawson’s postgame speech, and she was going through and talking about some of the positives. Chelsea Gray drew a really critical charge foul in the late stages of the fourth quarter. And then Jackie Young went down and hit this really crucial, physical layup. Chelsea Gray hit another one when she asked the vets to step up.

But the other thing that she said was, let this be the last time that somebody goes out and plays with more passion than us. Let this be the last time that when we’re off on our scoring, that we quit. I’m paraphrasing a little bit, but it was like, woof.

And she specifically called out the team captain, Breanna Stewart, who was one for nine from the floor. She could not buy a bucket to save her life. But my God, the woman still got 11 rebounds. She battled out there to make sure that she was doing everything. She changed shots, altered shots. She gets that seven foot one wingspan, whatever she has.

And so I loved hearing coach Lawson praise her for that, because that’s what you have to do.

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: Lawson was talking about how you can get so wrapped up when you’re used to being a scorer. If that ball isn’t falling through the bucket, you get caught up in it, and then you stop playing elsewhere.

Alex: It was really interesting that she was able to call them out, but also be motivational about it.

Caitlin: She’s very good at doing that. She’s so good. Go look up Kara Lawson motivational clips and you will get a host of things that will give you goosebumps listening to. If you’re a sports head, go listen to that.

At the end of the day, a win is a win. We escaped a very, very low scoring game. I think Coach Lawson also made the point, she’s like, there was always going to be a game that was going to be our worst offensive game. That was just it. There’s no way that you have a worse offensive game than that. But as they say, defense wins championships. And we figured out a way to win. And she’s like, that’s what we can build on. We get to get right back at it tomorrow against Czechia. Let’s do it. So anyways, very interesting tale of two games.

Alex: Two games, two outputs.

Caitlin: All right, so to wrap up here, just a little bit of a reminder before we go to the next headline. Knockout rounds are coming. They’ll be here at the end of the week. So once you listen to this, quarterfinals will begin on Thursday, and then semifinals are played on Saturday. And then the final will be on Sunday.

Alex: And third place game is on Sunday as well.

Caitlin: And third place game.

Alex: Nobody cares.

Caitlin: I don’t care about that game. Maybe I will if somehow the USA ends up there. But yeah, so we will be watching. Tomorrow’s game against Czechia for the US doesn’t really matter, so they’ll get some reps in. I think she’ll be able to play a balance of the roster and things like that. But it’d probably be good to get all of the players seeing the ball go through the hoop.

The WSL Kicks Off With Its Biggest Season Yet

Alex: All right, moving on. The WSL has kicked off in England, anticipating its biggest season yet.

Caitlin: Yeah, I’m really looking forward to this. I was telling Alex, we’ve got to watch more of this. We had it on this morning.

Alex: Finally we got it so we could watch it.

Caitlin: So a couple of mini headlines from this. For the first time ever, more than 50% of all WSL clubs are led by women, which is great. We’ve talked a lot about needing more women in those head coaching roles, so it’s great to see that being represented there.

Multiple clubs are playing full time at their club’s top stadium. So you’ve got Stamford Bridge for Chelsea, the Emirates Stadium for Arsenal, Villa Park for Aston Villa, and King Power Stadium for Leicester City. And then some of the other clubs, Manchester United, Manchester City, will play certain games in the flagship stadium for that club. So hoping to see more of that.

The one team, as I segue into this next one, that I think is gonna need a bigger venue is London City. Given their offseason signings of the likes of Alexia Putellas, Mapi León, Mary Earps, former English national team goalkeeper coming back and signing there, among many others, they play in a pretty small stadium. I just see that getting ready to boom.

I think Michele Kang was interviewed recently. She’s the owner of London City Lionesses, along with the Washington Spirit and Lyon in France. And she said that they just signed a jersey deal with a sponsor, and it was for more than the flagship sponsor on the Atlanta jerseys, which was a big deal. I forget who that was.

Alex: I don’t remember what that number was.

Caitlin: It was a big number. So that’s awesome. She’s like, I’ll give you all of my money.

And then one other cool thing. I read this and it makes me love Alexia Putellas even more. She reportedly acquired the Spanish broadcasting rights for WSL games and is creating her own YouTube channel, Eleven TV, so that she can have the Spanish broadcast for folks in Spain, because of broadcast restrictions. Now that she has moved on from Barcelona, so they can continue to watch her.

Alex: That is awesome, that a player has acquired those rights to a game. That’s so cool.

Caitlin: And the fact that she found that so important, that she can stay connected with her community and her people.

Alex: I wonder if she wrote that in the contract.

Caitlin: She might have, I wouldn’t be surprised. And she’s young, that’s a savvy move for somebody to do. But she understands her power, and she’s using it, so good for her.

Cathy Engelbert Announces Her Retirement

Alex: All right, digging into some WNBA news. Commissioner Cathy Engelbert announces her retirement at the end of the season, prompting reactions of celebration and trepidation. We said it. I think it was, we knew the contract was coming up.

Caitlin: Yeah, there was no way she was getting re-upped.

Alex: Not at all. I think immediately first thought was, absolutely. Second thought was, they’re just going to install somebody who answers to Adam Silver. So unless he’s trying to make some inroads with players, I don’t know where that’s going to go.

Caitlin: So we had talked a couple of weeks ago, we had obviously highlighted Nneka Ogwumike’s retirement announcement from being a player. And she’s led the Players Association for 10 years. And we were kind of like, I call her for commissioner. And it was a little tongue in cheek, because A, we were like, Nneka can do whatever Nneka wants. She owes nobody now. She has done enough. Second of all, it was tongue in cheek because the NBA at the end of the day still manages the WNBA.

Alex: They need a yes man or yes woman in that spot.

Caitlin: And that role is beholden basically to the owners. It’s not a player advocacy role. But I do still think it’s important for somebody in that role to be able to develop a better relationship with the players. You can do that. You’ve talked about Roger Goodell, not that he’s perfect by any means, but even a David Stern from the NBA, from the 90s and whatever.

And then also, we talked about this problem of where the fandom is at right now too, and that being a really interesting challenge for whomever takes the role to embrace.

But yes, my fear is that this is going to turn into a role for a middle aged white man.

Alex: Yep.

Caitlin: Who is really only interested in serving the whims of his boss, which is the NBA commissioner. And that is inherently going to mean that we’re going to do things only for money. And potentially there’s some forsakenness of the players and the fans and whatnot.

And in my opinion, I think if you want somebody who can potentially bridge that gap, there are plenty, I’ve seen lists of qualified Black women who could be in that role. Now, I don’t know that the NBA is going to go that route.

Alex: Yeah, I don’t know if they will.

Caitlin: But there are women of color who are playing really critical leadership roles at the college level. They’ve played those roles in the NBA. They have played before, so they understand that. And I think those ingredients would be fantastic in the next commissioner.

Alex: Yeah, I agree.

Caitlin: Even if they do have to answer to NBA leadership.

Olivia Miles, A’ja Wilson, and Unrivaled’s Messy Bus Tour

Alex: Yeah. Olivia Miles named Rookie of the Month for the fourth consecutive month, strengthening her case for 2026 Rookie of the Year.

Caitlin: I don’t know how you argue against that.

Alex: I mean, she had one bad game and the people online were like, oh, this is your Rookie of the Year. And it’s like, oh my gosh, guys, come on.

Caitlin: To have an off day. Somebody who doesn’t really have any off days is also the other person who won Player of the Month. Player of the month, let me get it right, because that really made some people mad earlier this year when I said Player of the Month and it was supposed to be Player of the Week. Player of the Month. A’ja Wilson, also for the fourth consecutive time. And also likely, or should be, strengthening her case for League MVP. We’ve talked plenty about that.

Alex: Yeah. Unrivaled unveils a bus tour to announce their game tour, set to kick off in January.

Caitlin: Okay, at first I was like, this is really smart. The W’s on a break. There’s airspace for Unrivaled to fill, with FIBA going on and whatnot. And also fans love Unrivaled and they’re looking forward to it. And W season is getting ready to wind down. So here we are. This got messy really fast.

Alex: It’s a great plan to talk about Unrivaled over a span of multiple.

Caitlin: Couple weeks.

Alex: Weeks or whatever. But then it went bad.

Caitlin: Yeah, so here’s what happened. They’re like, we’re gonna do a tour to announce the tour. Which first of all, is just like, why? Okay. Great, so they’re doing a physical bus tour around the country to announce this tour. And everybody’s like, great, we want you to come to more cities. Like we’re talking about, if they come anywhere near us, we’d consider going, especially if it’s here in Minneapolis.

And so then Unrivaled is like, where’s our first tour stop? And then it’s like New York, where they went last year, which is not surprising. That’s great. They have a fan base. They know they can fill an arena there. But then what got fans irritated was, they announced New York, and then a couple hours later, tickets are on sale now. People are like, wait, what? I don’t even know where else you’re going. And at this point, we didn’t know how many other stops there were going to be. We didn’t know exactly where they were going to go.

And so I think the fan backlash prompted them to release a country map that sort of zones, like there’s some geo-zoning. But some of these zones, y’all, for our zone where we live in Minnesota: Chicago, Illinois, Missouri. So like Kansas City.

Alex: It might’ve gone out to Colorado, possibly.

Caitlin: Like a huge swath. And so it’s funny watching the interactions. And then also I do have to give, we’ve talked about this a lot, but Unrivaled’s way of engaging on social media is very social media savvy. This plan may not have been executed exactly how fans wanted it to be, but it’s funny to watch them comment on people’s things being like, I think I saw one that was like, is it okay for me to come back online now?

The one other thing that a couple of fans pointed out online was, I’m also in the throes of being asked to renew my season tickets. I’m being asked for more money right now as a women’s basketball fan. I’m getting ready to buy playoff tickets, all of these things. And so it is interesting to think about, if you zoom out and think about your consumers, budgetary constraints, especially in this economy. You almost need to think about the spacing of, okay, somebody’s gonna be less likely to pay for this now because they already were planning to pay for this other thing.

Alex: We could have maybe waited until the WNBA season to get those tickets going.

Caitlin: Yes. But what is cool is they are going to eight cities outside of Miami. So we’re hopeful that Queen Phee brings them here.

WPBL Playoffs Are Set

Alex: Yeah. WPBL playoffs are set, with San Francisco facing off against Boston, and Los Angeles taking on New York.

Caitlin: Yeah. So we’ve got semis starting this week, starting on Wednesday, and they’ll run through Monday if necessary. So these are best of three series between those two teams each that Alex just mentioned. And then finals will begin not this coming Wednesday, but next Wednesday. We’ll probably talk about it in next week’s episode. That’s a best of five series.

Now, one other thing to shout out here is that we have a hot home run leader race going on right now. There are games happening right now. So Denae Benites was leading the home run race with 11, with Kelsie Whitmore hot on her heels. Right before we got on to record, well, 20 minutes before we got on to record, I saw that Kelsie Whitmore had hit her 11th home run.

Alex: Here we go.

Caitlin: So here they go.

Introducing Jeff Goldberg

Caitlin: All right. You ready?

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: Let’s introduce our guest.

Alex: Do you want me to just straight up introduce this, or do you want to discuss what we went into here at all?

Caitlin: Well, let’s introduce him and then we can.

Alex: All right. Let me read this off. Our guest was Jeff Goldberg. Jeff Goldberg has covered UConn women’s basketball for the Hartford Courant from 2001 to 2006. As he puts it, the first 70 games he covered were all wins, with three straight national championships in there.

He’s written two books about the Huskies. Bird at the Buzzer is about one game, the 2001 Big East final, UConn and Notre Dame, Sue Bird at the horn. ESPN would later call that game women’s basketball’s first instant classic. He also wrote Unrivaled, about the rivalry between UConn and Tennessee, Geno Auriemma and Pat Summitt, and the 12 years that changed women’s basketball.

More recently, you could see him in The Dynasty: UConn Huskies, the Apple TV docuseries that came out a couple of weeks ago. And right before it premiered, he wrote something we haven’t stopped thinking about: that women’s basketball has been so busy fighting for its future that it never learned to look after its past.

Caitlin: Yeah. So Alex told me that we had been reached out to by Jeff’s team, and they were looking to do these interviews as this docuseries, which we would encourage all of you to go watch, was coming out. He’s a part of it. He told us in the interview, when you listen, he actually sat in a chair for them for seven hours being interviewed.

Alex: And his books were like source material.

Caitlin: And his books were like source material. So I told Alex after we got done with the interview, this guy is like a walking encyclopedia of women’s basketball in the early aughts in particular, which for me, this was a little bit of a kid in the candy store moment.

This is the era that I grew up in. I remember watching these games with my dad. I remember hating the UConn Huskies as much as probably anybody who just wasn’t a Connecticut person at the time. I just loved to hate Diana Taurasi. Loved to hate Geno Auriemma. For some reason, I really did love Sue Bird. I thought she was a little bit of a misfit.

But now you also think about how formative that dynasty frankly was to women’s college basketball in particular, and now what we think of as the W, and some of the most emblematic stars of our era of the W. You think of Maya Moore, you think of Diana Taurasi, obviously Sue Bird, Paige Bueckers. These are all players that came out of that system. Azzi Fudd. And it’s really incredible to have an opportunity to talk to somebody who was there, who got to talk to those players and talk to Geno and be along for it.

Alex: I think while you listen to the interview, unless you’ve seen other interviews with him, there are probably some stories here you’ve never heard before. So really cool.

Caitlin: We learned a lot. It was, like I said, awesome to get that insight. And I think huge thanks to Jeff and his team for reaching out and being willing to give us some of his time. And we hope that you enjoy the conversation.

The Blizzard Game That Introduced Diana Taurasi to Tennessee

Caitlin: Welcome to Raising the Game, Jeff. We are so excited to have this opportunity to talk with you. We were talking a little bit before we started recording, but when we got the invitation to have this conversation, I was like a kid in a candy store. I could not pick a better team or a moment in women’s sports history, really from my perspective, to anchor in on. And then just revisiting through the documentary, through reading the books that you’ve written, I got goosebumps multiple times. And so we’re really excited to dig into the story today, talk a little bit about that docuseries, and talk a little bit about your time covering the UConn women’s Huskies.

Jeff Goldberg: Outstanding.

Caitlin: Yeah, we’re really looking forward to it.

Jeff Goldberg: Anytime I hear that somebody read the books other than my mother, I get very excited.

Alex: That’s the same with our podcast. If we get someone other than our parents, we’re happy.

Caitlin: That’s right.

Alex: I think before we go too far down the rabbit hole, we want to set the stage for our audience of where this started for you. If you could give that backstory. I think there was a snowstorm involved in the situation.

Jeff Goldberg: There are a lot of snowstorms in Connecticut. They would be playing at Hartford, because they would always, and that’s actually part of the story, without getting too meta. When CBS would do the regular season games, particularly around 1999, 2000, 2001, what they were doing is they were scheduling that broadcast because they were contractually obligated to do one day of women’s basketball a year. After ESPN had taken over the NCAA tournament coverage, they weren’t doing the championship anymore, but they ended up with one day a year where they would do like a triple header of games. And the UConn Tennessee game was always their marquee game. But they would do it the first weekend of January, because basically whichever day they didn’t have an NFL wild card game, that was the day that the UConn Tennessee game would air. And so it was always early January, and early January in Connecticut is tough sledding. Take a chance.

The one that I always remember was Diana’s freshman year. So this was New Year’s Eve Eve, December 30th of 2000. And so it’s Diana’s first ever game against Tennessee. And there was a blizzard. There was a bomb cyclone, and they weren’t calling it that then, but it was a massive, massive snowstorm about to hit Hartford.

And the governor of the state, John Rowland, went on television early in the day. The game was scheduled for like four o’clock in the afternoon, again, because they probably had a playoff game before that. And so he went on TV and basically told people, don’t go, just watch the game on TV. Don’t come into Hartford. Don’t go to the Civic Center. Don’t go to this game because it’s going to be so treacherous. You may not be able to get out. It was like a Blizzard of 78 kind of thing that they were predicting. And so he was urging people not to go to the game.

I lived in West Hartford at the time, which was the town over. I was like five minutes from the arena. I actually booked a hotel room that was adjacent to the Hartford Civic Center, the XL Center. I guess I think it’s still the XL Center, but it was the Hartford Civic Center then. I got a room at the hotel that was connected to it, because I figured that’s the only way, I’m not going to be able to even get home.

And so it gets to be about four o’clock and there’s 14,000 people in the stands, and sitting at center court is the governor, having told everybody, don’t go. There he is, right there in the front row. Here we go, UConn.

So I mean, that spoke to the fan base. It spoke to how seriously people took the team, how big the Tennessee games were, and how bad the weather could get. It was all rolled into one fantastic game. And Diana went out there and hit the game winning three-pointer at the end of the game.

Caitlin: Right.

Jeff Goldberg: Pat Summitt was like, oh my God, four more years of this. And yes, it was four more years of that.

Caitlin: How do I game plan for this player?

Jeff Goldberg: Basically it would only get worse. That was like the easiest game that she had against them. She just killed them ever since then. So yeah, that was Diana’s introduction to UConn Tennessee.

Why Women’s Basketball History Goes Untold

Caitlin: I mean, you can’t ask for a more dramatic one. Also, metaphorical for that rivalry, which we’ll get into here in a little bit.

We finished watching the docuseries a couple nights ago, and I was reading your essay about it that you just put out, kind of the little blurb of, hey, this came about and here’s my experience with it. And you were saying that the director had read both of your books as research for the docuseries, trying to pull together what was the story he was going to try to tell with this. They were some of the only resources that he had that chronicled this in the detail that I think it deserves, that the story deserves, of UConn’s history.

As you think about that and reflect on that, what does that tell you about how much of the sports stories, in general, but even specifically about UConn, go untold?

Jeff Goldberg: I think it’s one of the biggest, I don’t know exactly how to put it, but I’ve always felt this way. I felt this way even when I wrote the first book, Bird at the Buzzer, back in 2011. My feeling is, and nothing has really changed in how I feel about it, is that women’s basketball, and this is not a knock on women’s basketball, I think it’s the way it probably should be, but women’s basketball, even today, even with all the popularity that the WNBA is having right now and how popular the women’s game in college has gotten, they are still really fighting for a seat at the table.

Caitlin: Totally.

Jeff Goldberg: It’s still nowhere near where it could be or perhaps should be compared to all men’s leagues. So I think women’s basketball as an entity, officially, unofficially, spiritually, however you want to put it, they’re just looking, everything is about where we’re going, where we’re trying to get to. And so when you’re like that, you don’t really want to take the time to sort of stop and look back. And yet with every season that goes by, they’re creating history as they go.

And obviously I walked out of the building that night when Sue hit the shot to beat Notre Dame in that Big East title game. I even said, we just watched the greatest women’s basketball game ever played. This was like the Laettner, the Duke Kentucky game. This is the women’s version of it. And I always felt that way. And so that was what ultimately led me to writing the book about that game.

But like I said, I remember talking to people at the time, even in 2011. Here’s this amazing story about these two incredible teams with all these future Olympians and Hall of Fame coaches and Hall of Fame players. If I hadn’t written that book, that game would be completely lost and no one would even remember it.

Who even remembers the Texas team that went undefeated in 1986? People talk about, oh, UConn went undefeated in 95. They weren’t the first ones to do it. It was Texas in 86, but that team, Jody Conradt coached it, I couldn’t even name you a player on that team.

Who remembers Cheryl Miller? Who remembers Anne Donovan? Who remembers Nancy Lieberman getting a tryout with the Pacers? All of this history is there, it’s there to be told, but no one is taking the time to tell it.

And so that to me is what makes this documentary so great, is they took the time to tell it and they researched the hell out of it. I remember when they reached out to me, they were like, we’ve just read your books and now we want to talk to the guy that wrote them, because you obviously have a lot of history with the team. And so I was in the chair for like seven hours. And I’m sure, I am sure if you asked everyone involved with this documentary, I’m sure now they wish they had done more than three.

Caitlin: I can tell you, I wish they did.

Jeff Goldberg: Yeah. I mean, my takeaway of it is it’s great, but man, there’s so much they didn’t get to because they couldn’t. They didn’t have time. You only have three episodes. And I know the way those things get set up. They were told, I’m sure from the very beginning, you get three. And they even admitted, when they started this project, they didn’t really know anything about UConn women’s basketball and they learned it as they went. And that’s why I say, they did the Patriots documentary, The Dynasty, for Apple, and that was 10 episodes. And I don’t know if we could have, I mean, you probably could have done 10 on this if you really wanted to, but five would have been fantastic.

But look, that’s the world we live in. But yeah, they did their homework. There’s stuff in this documentary that I lived through and I didn’t either remember it or didn’t know what happened. And I was like, wow. So I also didn’t know that Sue Bird had a potty mouth like that.

Caitlin: You haven’t been listening to her podcasts lately?

Jeff Goldberg: No, no. My true experience was when I covered her when she was a senior.

Caitlin: Probably pretty different.

Jeff Goldberg: Chris Dailey would have gotten all over her if she ever heard that kind of talk.

Caitlin: Well, I’m sure Geno just ran the potty mouth the whole time, right?

Jeff Goldberg: He might occasionally.

Caitlin: Yeah, a little bit here and there. Once in a while.

What Made the UConn Tennessee Rivalry

Alex: I think for this next one, I want to put myself in a chair here somewhere, because I’m a little bit of a newer women’s sports fan, women’s basketball fan, probably the last four to five years or so.

Caitlin: He has me to blame for that, Jeff, he has me to blame for that.

Alex: I really do. And so I do know the names, and probably a lot of newer fans still know the names, but they maybe don’t know that story, and maybe it was first brought out for them in this docuseries, talking about that rivalry. For newer fans, what you say in your book, that it was the 12 most transcendent years in women’s basketball, what would you tell a new fan? What made it that for women’s basketball?

Jeff Goldberg: I mean, it is the greatest rivalry that the sport has ever produced. And so I would say, think back if you’re old enough to remember like me, the eighties with the Lakers and the Celtics, and Larry Bird against Magic Johnson, or even, up in Connecticut where I live, the Red Sox and the Yankees, and the intensity of those rivalries and the way the fans felt about those teams.

And so you had in Knoxville, the dynasty. They were the original dynasty, Tennessee. And then here comes this upstart Connecticut team. And the fact that Tennessee was like, oh, we’ll play them, we’ll play anybody anywhere.

So when they played, they didn’t quite talk about it much at all. They show a clip of it, but when they played in the regular season in 1995, before the championship game which we all remember, they played in the regular season up at Gampel Pavilion, in January, on Martin Luther King Day in 1995.

And that was a situation where ESPN wanted to have a marquee women’s basketball game on Martin Luther King Day. And it was supposed to be North Carolina, which was the defending champion going into that season. They didn’t want to go to UConn. They had played UConn in the regional final in 94, so ESPN wanted a rematch. And Carolina was like, if we can’t have a home game, we don’t want it. But Pat was almost like, no, we’ll go, we’ll play them. Because again, they were like, we’ll play anybody. If it’s going to help the game, for the good of the game, we’ll do it.

And so they play that game. And the thing that I’ll never forget, it really did add this whole layer. I feel like it was the thing that really set it apart, it was like the first shot fired in the rivalry. The AP poll usually would come out on Monday morning for the women, and they decided, we are not, we’re holding the poll. We’re going to wait for this game to be over. And whichever team wins this game will be number one, because they’re one and two. So whoever wins will be number one.

And to this day, I can’t remember that ever happening. We’re going to hold the poll for this game. So it was almost like a de facto January national championship game.

And so ESPN does it, and then UConn wins it, and the New York Times put the game story on A1 the next day. Not the sports cover, the cover. That UConn had beaten Tennessee in a regular season game.

So it was really this magical thing that was happening. And then they play again in the championship game, and then it seems like every year they’re meeting either in the Final Four or the regional final, and it just kept feeding on itself. And then you get into the years that I covered, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004.

And of course, the rivalry between Geno and Pat just added this whole other layer to it, which was, from a writer’s point of view, it was like manna from heaven. Destiny wanted this rivalry to be great. We’re going to have the Final Four in Philadelphia in Geno’s hometown, and the two most famous cheesesteak restaurants are going to be Pat’s and Geno’s. Like, who’s writing the script?

And then he makes the comment about how Geno’s is the up and coming place and Pat’s is a little dilapidated. And then Pat took offense to it.

So not only was it a great line, and just completely teed up for them, they got this reaction that made it even better. And so it just went on, and things like that just kept happening. It was amazing.

The Evil Empire Quote That Went Very Wrong

Jeff Goldberg: If I can just tell one more quick one. They show all the newspaper headlines from when he called them the evil empire, but there’s a whole story there that speaks to this kind of unusual dynamic between the two of them.

The reason he said that is because we were in the bowels of the arena in Dayton, Ohio. No place in the world better to spend a March afternoon. UConn had just won to go to the Final Four in 2003, and the next night Villanova is going to play Tennessee in their regional final.

And the backstory there was that Harry Perretta, who’s the coach at Villanova, is Geno’s best friend, number one lifelong best friend from Philadelphia. And so Harry coaches at Villanova, and before the season, Pat Summitt had asked Harry if he could teach her his motion offense, because Harry ran this very intricate offense and gave UConn all kinds of problems. And I’m sure that was part of the reason why Pat wanted to learn it.

And so Harry and Pat got to be good friends and he taught her the offense, and now they’re going to play each other to go to the Final Four. So of course we had to ask about this development in the saga. And he goes on this standup comedy routine about, oh yeah, Harry and Pat are hanging out in the hot tub, and Pat’s buying Harry ties, and I’m the jilted lover, my best friend.

And then what he said was, and it was a reference, it was actually a reference to the Red Sox Yankees rivalry. A couple of months earlier, the Yankees had signed a pitcher that the Red Sox really were trying to get. It was a free agent pitcher from Cuba named José Contreras. Yankees got him. 2002, you can imagine, this is when the Red Sox Yankees thing was as crazy as it’s ever been.

And so the New York Times asked one of the owners of the Red Sox, Larry Lucchino, for a comment. And Larry Lucchino said, well, the evil empire has extended its tentacles into Latin America. So that quote was all over the media.

And again, in Connecticut, my dad was a Yankees fan, I’m a Red Sox fan. That’s how life was back then. Geno, a Phillies fan, but moved to Connecticut, started coaching in 1985. The Red Sox are in the World Series in 1986, so of course he glommed onto the Red Sox. Red Sox Nation generously let Geno be part of Red Sox Nation.

So he had sort of filed away in the back of his head that Larry Lucchino evil empire quote, and now he brings it out. My best friend has left me for the evil empire. And all the Connecticut writers that are talking to him when he said it, we all laugh, because we knew the quote, we understood the reference. He was doing the Red Sox thing. So we all write it.

And then it’s in all the papers and it gets back to Pat. Pat’s not a Red Sox fan, Tennessee.

Alex: Doesn’t know Star Wars.

Jeff Goldberg: No, and she had never seen the movie Star Wars. And I don’t know how much she followed the Cold War with the US and Russia, but she thought that he was actually calling her and the program evil.

Caitlin: Wow. This Southern lady. This was like an inside joke gone wrong.

Jeff Goldberg: It went very wrong. And in that Southern culture, evil is a word that is not taken lightly. So she really, and there were people down there who were like, no, no, no, no, he’s making this, it’s about the Red Sox and the Yankees. And she just wouldn’t have it. So that really set her off.

And then it gets back to Geno that she’s all torqued off. And he, again, he’s the immigrant kid from Philly. And you give your friends a hard time and they give it back to you. And that’s how you get your street cred. But that’s how he’s always lived. He does it to his players. He does it to the other coaches. And the idea is, yeah, sure, sometimes he’s trying to get a psychological advantage, but basically that’s just how he is.

And so when she was not getting the joke and taking it all personally and being all upset, that just made him mad, because it’s like, come on, what are you doing? And so it just ended in that.

But yeah, we loved it though. Boy, we couldn’t get enough of it. So we would provoke them. Like I said, we would just tee stuff up for them to say things that we knew were going to piss each other off. And then people couldn’t wait to tune in to see what was going to happen. So the rivalry exploded, but it was terrible for the two of them. It really ruined whatever relationship they might’ve had. It was just completely ruined.

Caitlin: Right. That’s honestly, I didn’t know all of that detail, so appreciate you expanding on that story too, because I think that narrative sometimes gets framed up, and especially in this day and age’s culture, where you have the keyboard warriors who are going to jump on and take a side, whether they understand the full context or not.

It’s sort of a really good lesson in, A, we can be a little bit jocular with one another, and B, let’s understand the full context first. I think you see that even now. I’m sure you follow the WNBA this season, there have been narratives that have gotten taken way too far. And while it keeps eyes on the league, we talk a lot on our podcast about how it takes away from these great stories about what we call the product on the floor, or the narrative behind that rivalry. We lose sight of that because somebody wants to be like, oh, Geno is an asshole or whatever. And it’s like, there’s so much more there that we should be talking about, we should be celebrating.

Visibility Then and Now: CPTV, SNY, and the UConn Fan Base

Caitlin: I think it was something that Geno had said to Diana when he was recruiting her, which was, hey, you’re going to do these amazing things. It would be a shame if no one saw them. And I think that was so poignant of him at the time, knowing what he had at UConn and the following, as you mentioned, the snowstorm fans. And her going to UCLA, or looking at UCLA I should say, which at the time was not what we know it to be today.

Alex: No, definitely not.

Caitlin: But I’m curious about your perspective on that now, in this digital age where players can even put themselves out there. We’ve seen that with Paige Bueckers, to use a UConn reference. Do you still feel like there’s a visibility problem that these women’s basketball players face, or is it different than it was back when Geno was trying to recruit DT?

Jeff Goldberg: In some ways, yes. And in some ways, no. I mean, in one way, visibility has never been better. To think back to when I was covering the team, I remember, I guess it was probably around 2011, 2012, I was off the beat, but I had a great relationship with Connecticut Public Television. And another thing that made UConn different in a way was the fact that all their games were on television, because Connecticut Public Television did all their regular season games, home and road, which was really unique. I don’t even know if Tennessee had all their games on television. But Connecticut Public Television did all their games, and they would do the pledge drives at halftime and the whole bit.

And the fan base of Connecticut women’s basketball, you know, Jim Calhoun gets roasted, and I’m the one that actually winds up telling the story in the documentary about the comment that he made about the daycare centers and the senior centers. But that was an accurate thing. That was the demographic of the women’s fans. They skewed older, or they were kids. That is how it was. He just said it in kind of a nasty way. So that older generation was your CPTV audience, either Masterpiece Theatre or UConn versus whoever.

But then around 2012, CPTV lost the contract to do the women’s games to the channel that I think they’re still on, which is SNY, a regional cable network out in New York. I think they do the Mets. Everyone at CPTV was heartbroken, and there were a lot of hard feelings about it, and the fans weren’t really crazy about it.

And I’m removed from it, and I’m thinking, this is the greatest thing ever. What a moment for women’s basketball, where a regional cable sports network was willing to outbid to get these games because they recognized the product. To me, that was a watershed moment, because that had never really happened before.

So again, the visibility, and for recruiting, how great that was going to be for their recruiting, because now they’re going to be on all over, they’re not going to just be on in Hartford and Fairfield County, they’re going to be all over the region, especially in the New York region. And that’s progress, even though it killed this amazing tradition. It was great, but it’s time to move on. The game’s got to keep moving forward.

In that sense, it has continued to move forward and the visibility is like never before. But there are obviously still growing pains.

The WNBA at 30, and Where the NBA Was at 30

Jeff Goldberg: And it’s funny. My take on what’s going on in the WNBA is a little bit different, but I try to look at it from a 30,000 foot view.

So the WNBA next year will be celebrating its 30th year. Tremendous anniversary. And I think back and I think, well, where was the NBA in year 30? Year 30 in the NBA was like 1976, 1977. In that late seventies era, the NBA was almost dead. And the finals were on tape delay. And there were racial issues, enormous, and drug problems, enormous, and the league was going nowhere.

And then these two guys showed up in 1979, and one of them went to Boston and the other one went to LA. But even then, the NBA didn’t really find its footing and skyrocket to what we think of the NBA now until really when they met in the finals in 1984.

And I look at the WNBA and I’m like, could you imagine in a year or two if Indiana plays, well, now it would be Atlanta, and you get Caitlin Clark against Angel Reese in the finals. That’s going to be the WNBA’s Larry and Magic. And who knows, that will draw eyes and that could be the thing that sends the WNBA into a much more positive upward trend from where it is right now, where people are watching it, but in some cases now it’s maybe, depending on your perspective, whether it’s the right reason or the wrong reason.

And women’s basketball at the college level is the same way. The NCAA tournament, the women have only had an NCAA tournament for 44 years. The first women’s NCAA tournament was in 1982.

Caitlin: Yes.

Jeff Goldberg: I don’t know if people even realize that. The women’s NCAA tournament is still in somewhat of its infancy compared to the men’s. But then they say, well, where was the men’s NCAA tournament after 30 years or 40 years? And that’s when UCLA dominated with John Wooden. And I remember when UConn was winning four or five championships in the mid 2010s, that’s kind of where the men’s tournament was in that portion of its history.

The women’s game is behind because it didn’t get the chance to start. Again, NCAA tournament not till 82, WNBA not till 97. So they are still trying to follow the path. But you look at the other sports, these established great, oh, March Madness, oh, NBA Finals. Well, it wasn’t always like that for those sports. They needed time and they needed things to happen for them to reach the point where they are now. The women’s game, let history unfold for them and let progress continue, and they will get there. They will get there.

Alex: I think that’s an interesting perspective. That’s a perspective that I don’t think anybody really has, particularly for the WNBA. Thirty years may seem like a long time, it’s not a long time. I mean, just the fact that they finally got a collective bargaining agreement that’s at least somewhat respectable. I guess it could still be a million times better.

Jeff Goldberg: Literally. Yes, yes. But at least they made some real progress. At least now they have their own flights.

Alex: Yeah.

Jeff Goldberg: Exactly. It’s not that long ago that games would get postponed because they couldn’t get flights. What are we talking about?

Alex: It’s such a cool perspective to hear, because that’s something that we have not hit on in the podcast. Where was the NBA at 30 years? Where was all this other stuff? And I think it’s really cool to bring that here now, because I hadn’t thought about it that way. So I really appreciate that perspective.

Jeff Goldberg: Yeah, it’s easy to get completely lost in the here and now, especially now. Everything is right now. But again, things have to evolve. Things take time. We want to remember the NBA as just, it’s all Larry and Magic and Michael and David Stern. And it is, and it did become that, it happened, but it took a long time for it to get there.

They talk about the Celtics in Boston. When the Bill Russell teams are winning championships every year, they couldn’t sell it out. They weren’t selling out Celtics games in Boston, even when they were winning championships every year. Those kinds of things just did take time, but they happened. And so let’s give the women’s game, the WNBA is now in a different place than it’s ever been. So there’s growing pains and there’s things that they need to work out.

My personal opinion, I kind of side with the players. I kind of feel like they really need a better commissioner than the one that they have. No offense.

Alex: We agree. We’re in agreement.

Jeff Goldberg: They do. And that’s what the NBA needed. Larry O’Brien, they named the trophy after Larry O’Brien, but was he really that good of a commissioner? I don’t know. But David Stern knew what he was doing. David Stern had the vision and he understood what needed to happen and he made it happen. And so maybe they’ll get a commissioner that will be like their David Stern and we’ll get this thing really moving in the right direction.

Caitlin: Well, someone who shares your perspective on the W, Jeff, is actually another character from the docuseries, and that’s Dawn Staley. She was in a recent interview asked about it, and she said the same thing that you basically did, which was, we’re good, you just got to give it time. She did say, look at the NBA at the same time point. There was a lot of not so good stuff going on for it. You just have to let it cook.

Jeff Goldberg: Yeah, exactly. Let Caitlin cook.

Caitlin: Let them all cook. Let Olivia Miles cook. Let them all cook. There’s some great stars out there. And again, I think the point is we all want it now. I feel like too, in this digital age, we have all the information at our fingertips. Just got to let it cook.

Jeff Goldberg: Yeah, and you’ve got a lot of new fans and that’s terrific, but even the new fans need time to settle in and understand what it is their fans have.

And that was something that I can tell you from very personal experience, that that was a lot of what was going on with the UConn women’s fans. UConn women’s fans, and I don’t mean this in any disrespect, God bless them, I love them, they made my life, I have a career because of these people, so I have nothing but great things to say. But they weren’t really sports fans, a lot of them. They were UConn women’s fans. They weren’t even necessarily women’s basketball fans. They were UConn women’s basketball fans. They cared about the team.

Caitlin: Yes.

Jeff Goldberg: But they didn’t really have a high sophistication level for sports in general. And we would joke at the Courant, we would put in the paper, if they’re in the NCAA tournament and you knew they were going to play on Monday, but you didn’t know what time or what channel they were going to be on, so we would put UConn versus Old Dominion, TBD. To be determined. And people would call the paper and be like, what network is TBD? Where can I get TBD?

Caitlin: Right. Where do I get that broadcast?

Jeff Goldberg: We don’t have that one. Because they just, again, they needed to learn, and they cared. But you could not argue, they may not have had the knowledge, they may not have been like us sports bros, but they had the passion and they cared.

The Nykesha Sales Free Basket

Jeff Goldberg: There was some hell of a payout, and a million things that they could have talked about in the documentary that they didn’t. I don’t even know if you guys know this story, and this is a whole thing.

In 1998, they had Nykesha Sales, who was a freshman on the 95 team. She was kind of the last piece that put that whole team together that went 35 and 0 with Rebecca Lobo. She was a freshman. And she wound up, by the time she was finished, she was the best player in UConn history, to be replaced by other best players in UConn history. But she was the one in 1998, and she was about to break the UConn scoring record.

The second to last game of the regular season, she blew out her Achilles. One point short. So she was one basket away, one point short of setting the record. And she blew out her Achilles. So her season is over.

And so what happened? The last game was against who? Villanova, Harry Perretta, Geno’s best friend. Every time Geno gets in trouble, it’s because of Harry Perretta, by the way. I don’t know if they realize this, every big controversy that ever happened to Geno.

Caitlin: May not be a great influence.

Jeff Goldberg: But anyway, yeah, always the intentions are always good. Geno calls Harry and says, look, this is her record, she would have broken this record, hundreds of points between the Big East Tournament and the NCAA Tournament. This is her record. I need to get her this record.

So they agreed. And it was the famous thing where there goes Nykesha Sales at the start of the Villanova game on crutches, stands under the basket, and they tip off and Villanova lets UConn get the tip, and they dribble it down, they put the ball in her hands, she makes a layup, then UConn lets Villanova go down and score. So now it’s two to two, timeout. They take Nykesha off the floor and they play the game from two-two instead of zero-zero.

And she got the record and the world freaked out. Now this is 1998. I don’t know what would happen if something like that happened today. It would probably be looked at a lot differently. But in 1998, it was sacrilege and Geno got destroyed in the media.

And what I’ll never forget, in 1998 I was at the Courant, I was the sports media columnist. I wasn’t covering UConn yet. ESPN, Dan Patrick and Kenny Mayne did SportsCenter that night. And to my knowledge, this is the only time this has ever happened on SportsCenter. They opened the broadcast with this happening and they showed the highlights of Nykesha getting the basket and all that. And then they stopped and both of them gave editorials. They gave their opinions on why this was the worst thing that ever happened. And that they should just basically not even have women’s basketball. I don’t know if they said that, but it was, it’s an embarrassment, it’s ruining the game, you don’t mess with the game like this, who do you think you are?

And so our columnist at the Courant, Jeff Jacobs, God bless him, love him, great guy, he wrote a column also basically saying, this is BS, they shouldn’t have done this. And he said, this isn’t Nykesha Sales, this is Soupy Sales. Now for the youngins out there, they have no idea who Soupy Sales is. Do you know who Soupy Sales is?

Caitlin: I’ve heard a reference before, but share for us.

Jeff Goldberg: Soupy Sales was kind of like a vaudeville comedian. And his big thing is he would squirt water in your face, that was his thing. He was like Shecky Greene kind of guy. But if you’re an older UConn women’s fan, you knew who Soupy Sales was, because that was your era.

We got more letters about the Nykesha Sales basket and him calling her Soupy Sales than any topic in the history of the paper, to the point where we ran a full length, like 12 to 16 page special section just reprinting the letters. Somebody called in a death threat to Jeff Jacobs because of what he said about Nykesha. And again, not even a blip of a mention in the documentary, but at the time it was an enormous, enormous deal. All Harry Perretta’s fault, by the way.

But that kind of stuff happened. And the passion, the letters, you would think wars, Kennedy assassination or Vietnam, something would have happened that would, no. The most letters ever received at the Hartford Courant was because of Geno Auriemma letting Nykesha Sales get a free basket and then getting criticized for it.

Caitlin: That’s wild.

The Stories Jeff Still Wants Told: 2001 Notre Dame and C. Vivian Stringer

Caitlin: Jeff, you had mentioned at the beginning, we were talking about some of those untold stories, and I actually had a question in here mentioning Cheryl Miller, Nancy Lieberman, or the 1986 undefeated Texas team. And my thought was, if you were going to green light a documentary or a docuseries, what’s the next story you would want told? And I would say all women’s basketball, women’s sports, or even a UConn one that maybe wasn’t hit on.

Jeff Goldberg: Yeah, well, selfishly I would say I would love to see a documentary about what happened in 2001. Not even so much the UConn part of it, but the Notre Dame part of it.

We’re only days away now from the anniversary. And the thing that I’ll always think about with that book and the work I did for that book has nothing to do with the basketball. And that was when I flew out to Notre Dame, it was summer of 2009. And I’m in Muffet McGraw’s office and we’re talking about the game, and we’re talking about that season and they win the championship.

But I knew the story, which is she was supposed to be on Flight 175. She was booked on the flight that hit the South Tower.

Caitlin: Wow.

Jeff Goldberg: And what had happened was, she was recruiting a kid that actually wanted to go to UConn named Nicole Wolff, who lived outside of Boston. So she was supposed to then fly to Los Angeles from Boston on the 11th.

And the only reason she didn’t is because she had an assistant coach, Kevin McGuff, who was very bossy and very brash in his own way, and he was down in Providence. And I think Mike Brey, the men’s coach at Notre Dame, was also in Providence. So he was badgering her, no, no, no, don’t fly out of Boston, just drive down to Providence and we’ll all go together.

And she told me the story, and the reason why to me it’s very profound is because, so this is 2009, she had never told the story. It was the first time that she told at least somebody in the media. She told her experience and she said, if it wasn’t for him badgering me and the force of his personality, I would have been on the plane.

Caitlin: Oh, that’s crazy.

Jeff Goldberg: And so I put that at the end of Bird at the Buzzer. It’s the epilogue to the book. I mean, she wins the national championship in April and then five, six months later, whatever. And so that all by itself is an incredible story.

But to me, that season, that was the season where, UConn wins in 2000 in Philly and they have the parade back in Hartford the next day, and Geno guaranteed they’re going to win it again. And he should have, because they were bringing back that whole team except for like two role players who barely played. They were bringing back that whole team. Sue, Swin, Tamika, Asjha, and now Diana Taurasi is a freshman. So they should have won every game by like a hundred points.

But they didn’t. And then Notre Dame, which had never beaten UConn before that year, beats them in the regular season on Martin Luther King Day. It was almost like it was their version of the UConn Tennessee game from 95. Now it’s them in 01, and then they beat them again in the Final Four.

And so it was this amazing, and that’s Ruth Riley. That was Ruth Riley’s team, and Niele Ivey, who is now the coach at Notre Dame, who was phenomenal for me. What a tremendous, great human being.

But that was, to me, that’s like the one hit wonder of women’s basketball, because Notre Dame, they never got back. They went back to being kind of a decent but not particularly good team for about a decade. And then of course, Skylar Diggins shows up and away they go. And of course that became the rivalry that took over for UConn Tennessee and became UConn Notre Dame, where Muffet and Geno actually used to be pretty friendly when Notre Dame wasn’t a threat, and now they’re a huge threat and that relationship went completely south.

But that 2001 season was a very dramatic season for both programs, culminating with the two games, well, the three really. All three of the games that year were sort of their own little saga. So that’s a story that I would love to see told, obviously. But again, I’m being extraordinarily selfish when I say that.

I would love to see a little bit more told about C. Vivian Stringer and her career.

Caitlin: Oh yes.

Jeff Goldberg: We know her in Connecticut for her time at Rutgers. Another rivalry that does not get mentioned in the same breath with Notre Dame or Tennessee, but a fiercely bitter rivalry between UConn and Rutgers. Very, very testy, a lot of fights, things happening on the court. That was like the old Celtics and Sixers. The refs swallow the whistles, and they would beat the hell out of each other.

But her career. I mean, she took three different teams to the Final Four. Who’s doing that? Her, and in her life, the things that she, I don’t remember the exact relationship, but Korey Stringer, you guys know who Korey Stringer is.

Caitlin: Yeah, we do.

Jeff Goldberg: They were related, I don’t know. And so she had some real tragedies in her life. And of course, everything that happened with Don Imus in 2007, 2008. Her career, and nobody talks about her.

Caitlin: I know.

Jeff Goldberg: She was a trailblazer, she was one of the dominant coaches in the game, that no one outside of the East Coast has ever heard of.

Caitlin: Yeah. I love that one. That’s a great one.

Jeff Goldberg: And she’s amazing. She’s very sort of, I don’t know, I would say eccentric, she’s very idiosyncratic, and she was very brash.

The whole thing, the reason that rivalry with UConn got going, is when they joined the Big East in the mid 90s, they put out a media guide and they referred to themselves as the jewels of the East. And everyone in Connecticut’s like, excuse me? Wait, hold on, hold on here. Pardon me? They’re the jewels of the Big East, Rutgers?

Because that’s how they felt about themselves. So they were supremely confident. And they stood up to UConn and they pushed back at a time when nobody in the Big East was. And they said, no, no, no, we’re here and we’re gonna win games and we’re gonna beat them. And sometimes they did. And UConn didn’t always know how to deal with that, because C. Vivian backed down to nobody. Certainly not Geno Auriemma and these kids up in Storrs, Connecticut. She wasn’t intimidated by them at all. And her players were not intimidated.

And I can still see Cappie Pondexter, I think it was the 2005 Big East final, yelling at Geno on the sideline, and then the game ends and instead of handshakes in the handshake line, she starts poking him in the chest. Don’t ever talk to me like, I think he told her to shut the F up in the middle of the game, and then the game ends, then she went up to him, poked him right in the chest and said, don’t ever talk to me like that. Cappie Pondexter. Like, okay, who’s doing that?

So that UConn Rutgers thing, again, that was a rivalry that is lost, completely lost in history. That was red hot when it was going on. So yeah, I vote C. Viv, I vote 2001 season and C. Vivian Stringer. To me, those are stories I would love to see get, do a 30 for 30 on C. Viv.

Caitlin: Yeah. She deserves it.

Jeff Goldberg: She absolutely deserves it.

Caitlin: I agree.

What Happens to UConn When Geno Leaves

Alex: I think we got time for one more. I’m gonna pull from something that’s maybe a little bit more fun, maybe a little bit serious. When Geno leaves.

Caitlin: This has been fun, Alex.

Alex: Yeah, it has been fun. I’m having a great time. I’d go another hour if I could.

Caitlin: Have at it.

Alex: So one of the ones we wanted to ask is, how much of Geno’s success that he’s helped with at UConn, how much is that transferable, or does it just kind of go away when Geno’s gone?

Jeff Goldberg: Well, we’re all going to find out, aren’t we? And I would say this, not just Geno. That’s a package deal. Because Chris Dailey is going to go with it.

Chris Dailey, and there’s another one, by the way. How about this Chris Dailey story? Someone who could have left anytime to go coach anywhere else. And understood that if she had done that, she would have probably been a failure. Someone who knew her limitations. You say, a man’s got to know his limitations. She understood. I think she’s always sort of understood her limitations. And so she never left. She got the best job in the world. She’s making more money than she would make anywhere else. She doesn’t have to deal with the media, which I think that would have been a real problem for her. She was not a media savvy kind of person. It’s why you hardly ever hear from her.

And she understood. But she’s the heart of their recruiting.

Alex: Yep.

Jeff Goldberg: And so when she goes with him, that will be very, very, very difficult to maintain. Of course, he may never retire, so we may never find out. None of us are gonna be around for that, right?

Which, by the way, I feel like really speaks to something about Geno. People think he’s a jerk, whatever, and then the thing with Dawn Staley and all. He cares. He does. He cares and he yells at his players and he beats the hell out of them psychologically, but he loves them.

And I always feel like every year he probably thinks about retiring. Like when Paige Bueckers left and Azzi left, he’s probably like, well, people say, you ought to go out on top, you won, and now those two are gone. And he’s probably looking down, he sees Sarah Strong, he’s like, I can’t leave Sarah Strong. She’s still got like two, three years to go. I gotta stay. I gotta see her through to the end. But the problem is there’s always another one. I think he feels like he would be abandoning them. He doesn’t want to do it. So he keeps coaching.

So I don’t know when he’s gonna quit. They may have to carry him out in a box.

Caitlin: That’s what I say. I feel like he’s gonna do it right until he’s done.

Jeff Goldberg: Yeah. I mean, he’s gonna be 73 in March. I remember writing a thing about him when he turned 50, like, how much longer is he gonna go? 23 years ago. No, he’s not going anywhere, apparently.

Did the Documentary Get Geno Right?

Caitlin: I am curious, Jeff, just to wrap up on this question. I thought the documentary did a really good job of capturing the different facets of Geno. The hard-ass, the guy that’s going to get on you, all the way to the emotion that you can see him have around these moments, usually around the relationships he has with his players and what they’re able to achieve.

How did you feel it was portrayed? You know him, you’ve talked with him. Do you feel like it was encapsulating enough? I think Geno has this public persona to a lot of the world of being very tough, but you do see glimmers in the public eye of those relationships. What was your takeaway watching it back? And do you think they captured his essence there?

Jeff Goldberg: I knew they had gotten it right in the first minute. When they show him and they’re like, can you take off your shoes? And he gives them his business shoes.

Caitlin: Yeah.

Jeff Goldberg: I was like, oh, that’s my Geno. There he is. Like, to me, they could have just stopped it right then and there. Everything you didn’t know about him, right there, about the shoes.

Caitlin: That’s awesome.

Jeff Goldberg: And again, I think they did a really good job because he’s a very complex individual. Whatever your caricature, whatever your top line psychoanalysis of him is, he’s a hundred other things at the same time.

And I had people come to me when I went from UConn to covering the Red Sox. I had Red Sox writers say, well, you must be so ecstatic that you’re not around him anymore, that you don’t have to deal with that asshole anymore. I would look at them like they had three heads. That was the greatest five years I’ll ever have. Because he would fill up our notebooks every single day. He was the most thoughtful, the most humorous, most interesting person I ever covered. No offense to Terry Francona. Love Terry. But come on, it’s not even close.

Geno, he’s a real person with real emotions and real complexities and idiosyncratic, whatever. He has it all. But he does care about those players. He’ll yell at them like they’re his kids. He can yell. He won’t let anybody else say anything about them. But he’ll take them to the woodshed.

But then, to me, the ultimate thing is look at all the former players who probably were like, like Breanna Stewart said, that was the best four years of my life. I would never do it again. Okay. But look how many of those players went on to become coaches themselves. Tamika Williams and Shea Ralph, and now they’re like, oh yeah, now I get to do to my players what he did to me.

Caitlin: Ooh, they love it.

Jeff Goldberg: I’ve had some of his former players that became coaches actually say that, like, now I get to do it. Because as they get older, even if they didn’t understand it at the time, Paige Bueckers in 10 years is going to be like, that was the best thing that ever happened to me. He put me through the wringer like that. I guarantee it.

They all come back and they are all part of the family, and it’s not a cult, it’s real. Because he did bring out the best in them, and for a lot of them it was the best years of their lives, even as they were hating life going through it. It was the best years and they know it now.

And the ones that really succeeded also understand that they probably would, with Diana, have been Diana without Geno, I don’t know, maybe not. With Sue, I don’t know. Certainly Rebecca Lobo would be the first to tell you no way she wouldn’t. She says it in the thing. He was the only one that could have gotten it out of me.

So there you go. He’s a lot of things. He’s not just the guy that wanted to bust Pat Summitt’s chops. There’s more to him than that. And that’s what I would say.

Caitlin: Yeah, for sure. Well, I think that’s a good spot to just tease out to our audience. You should go watch the docuseries, because you do get a lot of that complexity from Geno and hear from all of these players.

Jeff, you mentioned too, like they come back. They show clips of some of the different ways that he’s been honored at UConn, and all of those players show up. They don’t miss those moments, and that says a lot about what he does cultivate, from the connection, the relationship piece, and how he really does help them get the best out of themselves, I think, in a lot of ways.

All right. Well, I’ve seriously enjoyed this time. I would actually love to have you back and talk more about anything women’s college basketball. Seems like we could go a lot of different ways.

Alex, do you want to share? I know you have the books with you, and Jeff, I can see them behind you over your shoulder.

Jeff Goldberg: I don’t have them right next to me. Product placement.

Alex: I know what I’m learning. I love it. I’m on the other side of it now, but I’m learning how to do it.

Jeff Goldberg: There you go.

Alex: Looks good. Just to tell our audience again, make sure to check out The Dynasty: UConn Huskies on Apple TV, Unrivaled by Jeff, and Bird at the Buzzer by Jeff. Is there anything else that you have in the works that you want to plug?

Jeff Goldberg: Not right now. We’ll wait and see.

Caitlin: We’re looking to see a Vivian Stringer something. I feel like we lined it up. Hey, you got a working title.

Jeff Goldberg: The Jewel.

Caitlin: The Jewel. All right. Well, Jeff, it’s been fantastic. Really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming on Raising the Game.

Jeff Goldberg: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. It’s been fantastic. Makes me feel 20 years younger getting to talk about going back into what I covered.

Caitlin: Time machine.

Alex: A little time machine is nice.

Caitlin: All right. Take care.

Alex: Thank you.

Jeff Goldberg: Thank you.

What to Watch This Week

Caitlin: We hope you enjoyed that conversation with Jeff Goldberg. As we mentioned, really fun for us, and hopefully you enjoyed it too as a listener. And now we’ll move into what to watch.

Alex: Yeah, let’s do it. Wednesday are the quarterfinal qualifiers. I think it’s for groups C and D, because Tuesday, I think, is A and B. We still do not have times on those. Then we have the actual quarterfinals on Thursday. So those qualifier winners versus the first place from each group on Thursday, I believe is how that works. Saturday, like we said, semifinals, time still TBD. And then Sunday, third place game at 9:30 a.m. Central, and the final game is at 1 p.m. Central.

Caitlin: Okay, I was gonna say, I think it’s safe to assume with the time difference it’s gonna be around midday.

Alex: And I think that Thursday is like four full games, so probably starting around 9:30 in the morning, or even earlier, 7:45, 7 o’clock.

Caitlin: Yeah.

Alex: NWSL, we’ve got Friday, Angel City versus Denver Summit, 9 p.m. on ION.

Caitlin: Critical for both.

Alex: Huge. Saturday, we’ve got San Diego Wave versus North Carolina Courage.

Caitlin: Also important.

Alex: 5:30 p.m. Central on ION. And then Sunday, we’ve got Washington Spirit versus Boston Legacy, noon on ESPN.

Caitlin: Which is like a need to win for Washington. But could Boston play a little bit of spoiler? I feel like every time you read NWSL games now, I’m just gonna be like, oh, critical.

Alex: Yeah, it’s all critical.

Caitlin: Unless it’s Chicago.

Alex: It’s not critical. Well, you don’t wanna lose to Chicago.

Caitlin: That is true, that is true. I’m so sorry, I don’t like making fun of teams, but they’re just so bad.

Alex: LPGA, we have the Solheim Cup in the Netherlands, Friday through Sunday on the Golf Channel, probably a little bit earlier in the day for that.

Caitlin: Yes.

Alex: And then like we said, we just outlined the WPBL semifinals. Wednesday, Boston versus San Francisco at six. Thursday, LA and New York at six. Friday, San Francisco versus Boston at five. Saturday, New York versus LA at six. Sunday, Boston versus San Francisco at two. And Monday, LA versus New York at six.

Caitlin: Nice. Did you see that they have their own beer that got made for the Robin Roberts stadium area?

Alex: Yeah, that’s a whole can, WPBL can. It’s very cool.

Caitlin: Yeah.

Alex: And then the US Open, the women’s singles semifinals do start Thursday with the final on Saturday.

Caitlin: Yeah. Plenty of action to catch in the rest of the week here.

Momentum and Setbacks

Caitlin: Momentum and setbacks.

Alex: Oh, I don’t know if I have a setback.

Caitlin: I do.

Alex: Maybe Orlando’s coach firing.

Caitlin: Oh, yeah. That’s a setback. Or do you feel like that’s a momentum?

Alex: It could be momentum. I haven’t looked at the most recent scores.

Caitlin: So maybe you should pull it up while we’re sitting here.

So mine is that yesterday during the Naomi Osaka tennis match, there was some unfortunate choice in broadcast commentary to call out her mental health while she is playing, using words like she’s pouting.

And A, that’s never appropriate, ever. You don’t need to comment on anybody’s, you can talk about how, hey, this is a tough challenge for this player, how will they respond? That’s fine. But putting your own personal opinion onto what you think a player is going through in a difficult moment is not okay. And it’s extra not okay when it is a woman who has been very brave in her openness around her own mental health journey. That to get dragged out on a national broadcast while she is, obviously Naomi didn’t hear this, while she is playing, it’s to me irresponsible. It’s disrespectful. And I don’t know why we’re still tolerating this kind of commentary around athletes, women athletes in particular, and in particular, someone who has been so open and so generous in sharing about her own personal struggles. It’s just abhorrent to me. It’s abhorrent.

Alex: Yeah, it’s gross.

Caitlin: Yeah. From a momentum perspective, I’m gonna stay on the tennis. I gotta give it to Iva Jovic. I know she’s headed into the Coco Gauff match, who also has a ton of momentum right now. And then honestly, I’d also give, I know she lost, but momentum to Alex Eala. She continues to perform really well at these tournaments and the fervor behind her. But these two young players, again, that match was incredible to watch, and just how they stayed in it both physically and mentally, in something that’s very exhausting, is awesome.

Alex: Yeah, it was.

Caitlin: I also give it to Denver Summit.

Alex: For my momentum, I think I’m just really excited to see where the whole flag football thing goes. It’s growing like crazy. I remember thinking a few years ago, if any of our kids ever want to play football, I want them to, but I don’t want them tackling or getting hit in the head and things like that. And so to have a way to still do that, it’s really cool.

Caitlin: Yeah, I feel like we gotta get at least our oldest an opportunity to try it out, because that girl can sling a football. And she’s tall too. We were just talking today about how tall she is. So if she can see over defense and stuff, she can be dangerous. Love it. All right. What do we got?

Alex: All right. Instagram, Threads, YouTube at RTG underscore pod, rtgpod.com, and raisingthegamepod@gmail.com if you want to email us.

Caitlin: Yeah. Let us know what you think, or thought, of the interview. We’d love to hear more, and we appreciate you being here every week. Bye.

Alex: Bye.