If you follow our site regularly and you come here for coverage of women’s college basketball, you know that LeBron James watched the first half of Sunday’s USC women’s game against UC Riverside. LeBron stayed to watch JuJu Watkins and the Women of Troy while his son, Bronny James, was tending to postgame media responsibilities following the men’s game on Sunday in the Galen Center. The unusual and much-hyped doubleheader — with the men first and the women second — enabled LeBron and other attendees of the first game to stick around and watch the women’s team do what it does so well: play winning basketball.
USC is 8-0 and now No. 5 in the country. The Trojans are very likely to finish nonconference play without a loss in the regular season. They are one of five Pac-12 women’s basketball teams in the top 10 of the national rankings (with UCLA, Stanford, Colorado, and Utah).
Because USC fans attended Bronny James’ debut on Sunday afternoon and then stayed for the women’s game, the USC women’s basketball team definitely played in front of a few thousand fans who had not seen the team play before. That’s a very definite, concrete step toward building a fan base at a time when women’s basketball is beginning to take off as a hot property on television and in mass media.
Luca Evans of the Orange County Register noted how excited USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb is about the growing fan interest in her program, and how JuJu Watkins is the main driver of that increased interest:
“She (JuJu) is necessary for women’s basketball to have an urban community come and feel like this is their team … it’s so much bigger than me, and it’s bigger than even this particular crowd,” Gottlieb said.
Watkins is aware of what’s happening, too. “It’s amazing,” she said after Sunday’s win. “Women’s basketball is just on a different level right now.”
Caitlin Clark — whom we have discussed with our friends at Hawkeyes Wire — might have become for women’s college basketball what Magic Johnson and Larry Bird became for men’s college hoops in 1979.
Lindsay Gottlieb is seeing these forces at work. She is loving what she is seeing.
“It’s unbelievable – like, I get chills thinking about, what my vision was in coming here,” Gottlieb told the Orange County Register. “And obviously, I never envisioned, like, all the characters and the things that were at play today. But you envisioned doing something special … Really, to have a large portion of that crowd that maybe has never seen us play, we are changing a culture here.”
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