How Lindsay Gottlieb brought Southern Cal, led by JuJu Watkins, out of March Madness funk

To understand how the most interesting coach in the NCAA women’s basketball tournament wound up coaching the sport’s most gifted freshman with a chance to wake the echoes of the sport's original dynasty at Southern Cal, let’s go back to Chicago. 

Lindsay Gottlieb is there to speak at a junior clinic. She’s the head coach at Cal-Berkeley, a mainstay by this point in West Coast basketball, a Final Four appearance under her belt. A mutual friend had connected her with Koby Altman, the young general manager of the Cleveland Cavaliers. She texts him congratulations on hiring John Beilein — a move that, while ultimately unsuccessful, had piqued her interest as an outside-the-box thinker. 

Altman is in Chicago, too, getting ready for the combine. He proposes a meeting while they're both in town. Gottlieb thinks it’s a little strange — shouldn't he be worried about what he's going to do with the No. 5 pick? 

They sit down. Altman knows everything about her. He talks about rebuilding an NBA team through the draft and the need to get people in the organization who have experience dealing with 18- to 22-year-olds. He asks if she would be interested in leaving her job in the Pac-12 to be an assistant in the NBA. 

“Jaw on the ground,” she said. “That kind of completely turned my world upside down.”

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The idea of coaching in the NBA was both out-of-nowhere and completely natural. For the previous few years, Gottlieb had built a network of friends and contacts in the NBA to do some professional development that had kind of stopped in the college sphere once she became a head coach.

She had spent time with the likes of Doc Rivers and Steve Kerr and would occasionally get calls from front office types to see if she knew any young coaches who might be interested in internships. And with Becky Hammon’s prominence as an assistant with the San Antonio Spurs, NBA people were increasingly interested in and open to women playing prominent roles in coaching and the front office. 

But a successful head coach of a major conference program leaving to sit on an NBA bench as an assistant? That doesn’t happen. For a men's coach in a similar job, it wouldn’t even be under consideration. Plus, there was a husband and a 2-year-old son and her players at Cal. Leaving would impact a lot of lives.  

“I really struggled,” she said. “Ultimately, I started thinking, what if I don't do this? How am I going to feel if I don't do this? I don't think I would have slept well if I turned it down.”

Lindsay Gottlieb finally tells Southern Cal 'yes'

To understand how Southern Cal is playing in its first Sweet 16 in 30 years with a wunderkind named JuJu Watkins who is averaging 27 points per game, go back to 1983.

It's the second year the NCAA is holding a women’s tournament, taking over from the AIAW, which had previously governed women’s college sports. The winner is USC, a team that went 31-2 with a freshman named Cheryl Miller playing an athletic brand of basketball that the sport had never seen. Alongside Cynthia Cooper and twins Paula and Pamela McGee, they aren’t just back-to-back national champions, they’re a phenomenon that changed how women's basketball was played and perceived. 

Their success brands USC as an iconic program that becomes associated with some of the sport's Mount Rushmore names like Lisa Leslie and Tina Thompson, who grew up around Los Angeles.

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But by the time Gottlieb enrolls as a freshman at Brown University in 1995, USC’s program begins to wither. From that point until 2021, USC made just five NCAA Tournaments and never reached the second weekend.

“In my time in the Pac-12, I think we always feared USC because they could still get players,” Gottlieb said. "There was definitely this prevailing notion that the one thing hindering USC was, do they really care about women's basketball? Are they invested?”

The decline of USC women’s basketball was, much like the school's football program, a symbol of how arrogance and entitlement ruined one of the sport's biggest brand names. While others in the Pac-12 and around the country were investing and building, USC was on cruise control — and the administration led by then-athletics director Mike Bohn knew it needed a shake-up. 

Simply based on her track record at Cal — seven NCAA Tournament appearances in eight years — Gottlieb was an obvious choice. If she could do that at a school with fewer resources, what could she do at a place that was ready to commit to being good? The NBA piece, working in the league for two seasons, made her even more intriguing. 

There was just one problem: Gottlieb kept saying no.

She ultimately envisioned becoming a head coach again at some point — “Lindsay, version 2.0," she says — but wanted to see this NBA experiment through, whatever that might mean. 

And she’s also loving it. She is loving the language of the NBA, she’s loving the unique perspective she’s bringing to the table in staff meetings and interactions with players. She's loving the scouting reports and the night-to-night challenges and learning about the X-and-O concepts in the pro game. 

She’s also very aware that she's one of the few women in the world who have had the chance to sit on an NBA bench and to be seen on an NBA bench. She believed strongly that the worlds and levels of basketball were constantly becoming more interconnected from pro to college, men to women, and she had a big role to play in making that seem normal. So every time USC calls — and they called a lot — she says it's not the right time. 

Then one day, she calls back. She watches “Women of Troy,” an HBO documentary about those star-studded 1980s teams. And, of course, she starts researching players in Los Angeles she might be able to recruit if she were to return to the college game. 

“I thought there was a unique opportunity to kind of bring back that history,” she said.

By this point, Watkins is already the best prospect to come out of Los Angeles in quite some time, a scoring machine who would soon become the first high school athlete to sign a representation agreement with Klutch Sports. 

As Gottlieb mulls taking the USC job, she calls around to get some information about Watkins and her upcoming recruitment. She is not stupid. 

Why Lindsay Gottlieb was ready for a player like JuJu Watkins

To understand what's ahead of Gottlieb and USC this weekend — the chance to reach a Final Four for the first time since 1986 — let’s return to Nov. 15, 2022. Gottlieb is beginning her second season at USC after going 12-16 in Year 1. There's not yet proof of concept of what the program could become. 

Watkins, however, sees the vision. She chooses to stay home and play for the Trojans rather than go to perennial powers Stanford or South Carolina. Gottlieb’s experience in the NBA has already paid off in unexpected ways.

“I just felt like I could communicate in terms that were, I don't know, more suited for her,” Gottlieb said. "She's a generational talent. I don't think she belongs in a cookie-cutter system, and I don't think she belonged in a cookie-cutter recruiting process.”

Sure, the football games and fancy recruiting dinners are great. But at her core, Gottlieb is a basketball nerd and had come back to college armed with the best X-and-O education on the planet. When Gottlieb is talking to Watkins about spacing the floor or ripping rebounds and creating transition offense, she’s talking about her real life experience game planning for Giannis Antetokounmpo and Ja Morant. 

“In conversations with JuJu and her family, I was very open in saying I don't think there's a model for what kind of player you are in women's college basketball,” Gottlieb said. “Even before if I had the mentality that you don’t just plug great players into a system, I didn't necessarily have the arsenal of tools to visualize how the court can be spaced for a player like JuJu or how you can use post players to vertically space. These are things I saw every day. In my two years in the NBA, you talk more X’s and O’s and do more X’s and O’s than probably 10 years in college because you're worrying about recruiting and study hall and everything else.

“There's no question the timing of that was perfect for me to get a player like JuJu because you have to utilize her in a more kind of pro style that allows her freedom and allows her to kind of operate in space versus trying to fit into a very static system.”

In her first game for USC, Watkins scored 32 points in a win over Ohio State. It wasn't an aberration. While the nation has largely been focused on Caitlin Clark and Iowa, South Carolina and LSU, Watkins put together one of the most impressive freshmen seasons in women's history and led USC to a Pac-12 tournament title and a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament.

When Gottlieb took the USC job, she couldn't help but make a mental note that the 2024 Final Four would be in Cleveland. Now, she’s two wins from bringing that part of her unique story full circle. 

Follow columnist Dan Wolken on social media @DanWolken