Lindsay Gottlieb | USC Trojan's Women's Basketball Head Coach

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Call 562-314-4603 for details. For Southern Cal, this is not new territory necessarily, but it's new for this group, right? New for this generation. It's been pretty cool to see how coaches resurrected USC onto this national stage. How much anticipation for these tournament games, coach?

And not just the NCAA tournament, but tournament games on your own court. Yeah, it's a ton of anticipation and excitement. I think at this point we're ready to play.

I feel like it's been a while. But everyone is really grateful to not be getting on a plane today. To have Galen be the host center.

We know that doesn't guarantee us anything. But to be able to play at home is something that adds a little bit of excitement for sure. This year has been about bringing USC back to the forefront. So there are a lot of firsts or there are a lot of firsts in a long time. We take a lot of pride in that because of the three letters on our chest and the women who have come before us. And so they're in the moment, but they're very conscious of history. Well, you mentioned the history and obviously USC was a powerhouse going back to the 80s and the early 90s. And Cheryl Miller and Tina Thompson and some of the other greats.

How much does it mean to you to have them now be around and be part of your present? It's unbelievable. I mean, it's very surreal. It's really my vision kind of coming true, which is cool. When I took this job, you know, I knew that USC had this rich history and we wanted to bring it back. It's not asking our current recruits or players to recreate something that happened three years ago.

We were asking them to call upon the great history of this place, but do it your own way. And so now to have our success shine a light on the former players in our program that aren't just the former great players of USC. They're some of the greatest that this game has ever seen. And we believe they deserve, you know, a spotlight. Cheryl, Lisa, Tina, Coop, the McGee's.

I mean, these are Mount Rushmore type people. So to have them have our back, to have them be excited about us, and to also shine a light on their greatness has been one of, I think, the more rewarding things about this season. Coach Lindsay Gottlieb of USC, a number one seed and looking to reach the Final Four for the first time since the mid-nineties when it was a program that was dominated by some of those icons.

It's After Hours with Amy Lawrence here on CBS Sports Radio. Whenever I read about you, I see quotes or I hear you talk about culture and family. What does that mean to you, Coach? Well, I think in college basketball, you know, you're a team 365 days a year, and there are only 30 regular season games. And so if you're only judging every day, you know, or your happiness or what you see success as, only on those game days I think you're missing sort of all the good stuff in between.

And quite honestly, I don't think you'll win as much then. So we try to build something lasting here. I want our players to enjoy being part of USC women's basketball. Obviously winning is more fun. But I tell recruits or I tell people to, hey, come on the day after a loss and see how we are, because that's the real stuff too.

And come on a random Tuesday in February and see if we still like being around each other. And those are the things I think measure success in a way that's a little bit more telling than just the scoreboard. And again, I think we're judged on the scoreboard. And shoot, we want to do a lot of winning and win some championships. But in terms of the big picture of what we do in the lives of hopefully 18 to 23-year-olds is more significant than just game day. How challenging is that in the new era of college sports where you've got Transfer Portal and NIL, and it seems like a lot of it can be the wild, wild west at times.

Yeah, I think I'm more wired to handle that maybe than some. When I was leaving the NBA to come back to college basketball, people asked me, why do you want to go back into that kind of chaos? And first of all, some of the changes I believe should have been here a long time ago. Player autonomy, getting paid for their name image like this. I get a paycheck, right? I get a bonus if we do well. Why shouldn't the players capitalize off their success? I've always been a proponent of that. And to me, it allows you to build your team through the portal.

It allows you to support players. But what it doesn't do is change the integrity of what matters in our locker room. I think both things can happen at once. I can have 13 or 14 different conversations with various players about their goals or what their future looks like, some in the WNBA and some going to law school, some making NIL money, some not.

And I think that's okay with the value one another. But what you need to do is have a culture built on people caring about what impacts winning or what impacts the program. And I think that if you do that in the locker room, the other stuff doesn't scare me as much as long as you do it, as long as you handle the portal and NIL in a way that allows you to have a successful program and empower young women to get everything they can out of this experience. And not just that, but for the Pac-12, about to be this massive exodus and a change on the horizon with conference realignment. Is that something you've pushed to the future and don't have to think about it for now?

It's so interesting. I think I wasn't thinking about it until the final Pac-12 everything, right? Like the final this road trip, the final championship. And I will say I take a lot of pride in that we won the final Pac-12 championship in Vegas because the conference has meant so much to my life personally.

But also it's been really, really important in college basketball. We are excited for a move to the Big Ten. I'm excited that people all over the country will get to see our team and not just West Coast people.

I think the platform is huge. And when it's time, we'll obviously plan for that. But there is, I think, morning something lost to the Pac-12 because there's so many great coaches and so many great teams. So we'll root for all of them to do well this postseason, and then we'll all go on our way and we'll try and go do some damage in the Big Ten. From USC, Coach Lindsay Gottlieb is with us here after hours on CBS Sports Radio. A lot of people know you from your time with the Cavaliers. We have a huge station in Cleveland.

They're massive fans. What did you take away from your time with the Cavs and in the NBA that you use now? I would listen to you sometimes on my drive home. We would get home really late. We would land at the airport and get in our cars and go.

So I would listen to you. I love Cleveland. We love Cleveland.

My family enjoyed our time there. I have nothing but love for the fans, the teams, still close, obviously, with the players and the coaches. But I think it made me a better coach. I think when you are able at any career to kind of pivot, and I went from being a head coach and very comfortable in what I was doing to going to a whole other world. It was still basketball, obviously, and the language of basketball translates, and I think a lot of things in coaching translate. But to get out of my comfort zone, I learned a ton.

And actually a ton that I'm using now, because we have, I don't know, more pro-style players in terms of spacing on the floor or ways to get into actions without necessarily being scripted all the time. I really call upon my NBA experiences a lot. And then to all the things you mentioned before, which is this ability to talk to players about their future, like it's okay to talk money or it's okay to talk gold, it's okay to talk ambition, and at the same time, try to coach a locker room into winning basketball. So the NBA experience was life-changing in so many ways.

We could go on and on about that, but I will say I would not have left if it were not for USC and this particular job, because I really felt a part of something in Cleveland, and look at what they've done. They've been incredible and really turned it, and I'm very proud of being a small part of that at the beginning of that kind of culture shift and that growth process. I'm going to pose the same question to you that I asked of Lisa Bluder over the weekend, and she's so passionate, so energetic, same thing, brings so much to the women's college game. But she's all excited about the momentum that we see for women's basketball, people buzzing about the tournament, and of course a lot of superstars of which you have won in Juju. But how do we, and I'll say we because I played college basketball, how do we keep that going so that it doesn't wane when some of these players depart? They're not departing.

I think it's only up from here. I mean, obviously, you know, Kaitlyn's going to go to the WNBA and hopefully bring her popularity there, but the game is exploding. I mean, Juju is unbelievable, and she's amongst the freshman class of other great ones too.

You know, Hannah and Madison Booker at Texas and Mikayla Williams at LSU. I think we're going to continue to see the talent. I think the difference is now it's on TV. Now there's an investment in it.

I mean, it's not shocking. Put women's sports on TV and people will get into it. I think the game has grown. I think Kaitlyn did something courageous going to Iowa.

I think Juju did something courageous going to USC. I know that sounds wild, but in women's basketball for so long, the best players only went to two or three schools, and now it's like, okay, who's turn is it to win a national championship? And, you know, now you have players saying, well, I can go to a school and maybe make that school great or draw other people to come with, and all of a sudden the game is more exciting. I think the game is in really good hands. As Kaitlyn departs, I think Juju's going to get those same crowds she already has. She's going to pass it along to the next generation, but invest in women's sports.

Put it on TV where people can see it, and I think this thing is going to continue to skyrocket. You definitely mentioned the depth, and it's changed so much in college basketball. So going back to your days at Cal or even some of your earlier days in coaching, how competitive is it now compared to what it was like then? I mean, obviously ever since I've been in coaching, it's been competitive to get recruits, or you want to try and win your conference or be at the top of your conference. I just think looking at the growth of the Pac-12, for example, now you have a situation in which, I mean, there's legitimately six teams from our league, seven teams that you wouldn't be shocked if someone made a Final Four.

And I think we're seeing that across the board. I mean, the depth of talent is great. I think these young players are coming in equipped and prepared. They have really good trainers or coaches coming up. So I think it's always been good.

I think it's been a little bit of an untold story, a little bit of a secret. And now you have really splashy players getting more attention, so there's more eyes on it. But I think our game has been really good for a long time.

But I think what I'm seeing more is the depth of talent across the board and it being spread out amongst a lot more teams. Lindsey Gottlieb is with us from L.A., coaching USC into the NCAA tournament coming up. The game against Texas A&M-Corpus Christi on their own campus, and that's this Saturday.

It's After Hours with Amy Lawrence on CBS Sports Radio. You mentioned Juju. All right, unfair, loaded question, Coach. But what makes her so special?

Oh, man, we probably don't have enough time. But a couple of things, like if you watch her, I don't know that there have been too many female players, certainly not 18 years old, with her combination of power, skill, explosiveness, shiftiness, basketball IQ. She's really an artist on the court. She brings it all. She's almost unguardable in transition. She does a great pull-up.

She makes the right reads. She makes those around her better. She can rebound. She can pass the ball. But beyond the basketball, the technical things and the stats, if you think about it, to be that good and have your teammates respond to you in a way that hers do is a really telling factor.

This season would not have gone this way if I had this great 18-year-old and people didn't like playing with her. She's been magnetic. She's made those around her more confident. She's gotten people to rally with her, and I think that's a very cool thing.

We have other hoopers. We have other excellent players, don't get me wrong, but I think everyone walks around with a little more swagger and a little more confidence because Juju gives that to them, and that's a really positive quality. She's a winner.

We went from pick six in our conference to a one-season NCAA tournament. We've seen every coverage for her this year, and three, four, five people put on her, and she just makes the right play, and I think it's elevated our team. I don't think she gets enough credit not just for her individual talent but for the way that she's really revived the program and brought others along with her and what she does for the community. I think she's really important, and I think that's going to play out over the next several years as well.

Interesting that you say that because Lisa said the same thing about Kaitlin Clark. She's an amazing teammate. The teammates around her love to play with her and actually are really excited about her success as opposed to being jealous or getting tired of her always being in the spotlight. Our players like winning.

They had confetti falling on their heads. We've gotten to celebrate a lot. We've beaten great teams, and they've done their part. That was very widely talked about in the Pac-12 final. Juju had scored 51 at Naples, and Tara is the greatest coach in the history of college basketball, men or women, the most wins. She came with a game plan where she said, okay, anybody but Juju and put essentially four people on her. Mackenzie Forbes goes nuts and scores a bunch, and Raya Marshall is dominating the inside of the board.

So we have other players, but I think they really like to win, and who doesn't want to be part of that? And Juju is a selfless superstar. She deflects attention at times. She gets a lot of attention, but she shares that stage, and she is a really nice, fun, humble person.

And so, yes, she's easy to be around, which obviously makes my job easier, but it's been nothing but positive for us. So as you head into the tournament, it seems like 60 points. It's kind of the magic number for you guys. If you could hold opponents under that number, you're unbeaten. How would you describe your defensive philosophy?

So it's funny. Last year I thought we clawed our way into the NCAA tournament on the back of our defense. I have an incredible associate head coach, Beth Burns. Nobody does defense better. And so this year obviously there's more talk about offensive stuff, but I think we're very long. So Raya Marshall, who was a defensive player of the year finalist last year, has only gotten better. She's still a shot blocker, but now she quarterbacks the whole thing.

Juju is really long, and Mackenzie Forbes, and Kaitlyn Davidson is a terrific defender. So we do a lot more switching. We get deflections. We're not necessarily full-court pressuring the same way that we did last year, but I think we use our athleticism and our length to our advantage. We try to be hard to score on, and that's the key for us, because if we can get stops, I think we can push and run and transition. Obviously it's tougher when that other team is putting the ball through the net. So we really like to use our length and hopefully get some stops and get out on the other end of the floor. Does it matter that you had the experience last year and some of your players had a taste of the tournament before?

I think so. I was watching the first-four game last night that happened to be at Virginia Tech, which is where we were last year, and it definitely brought back memories. I think our program trajectory has continued to grow, so there's been a lot of firsts.

But yes, I definitely feel like the experience for Rea, for Clarice, our guys who were there last year, helps. But a lot of it, this is a new team, and what I've tried to really hone in on with them, and they were terrific with this in the Pac-12 tournament, is carrying two things with us all the time. Number one is joy and having two feet in the moment and still being excited and happy to play, because I've seen some of these other top teams with the weight of the world on their shoulders, and we haven't had that. So I want that joy, and at the same time you want that juxtapose with the urgency of a one-and-done situation, which is where we are. And so I thought in the Pac-12 tournament we were loose, and we were having fun, but we were some tough mofos out there too, right? Because we knew it was win or go home, and so that's what we want to carry, and I think that's more about what we've been about versus first time or veteran. It's more just trying to be in the present moment.

Well, the joy is clearly evident on their faces, and also that sense of urgency with this season that evokes memories of the late 80s and the mid-90s and some of the greats at USC. It's an awesome privilege to have you on the show, Lindsay Gottlieb. Thank you so much for a couple of minutes, and good luck moving forward. Thanks, Amy, for having me.

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