USC women’s basketball coach Lindsay Gottlieb was a guest on Richard Deitsch’s newest sports media podcast. For a USC program which has attained national relevance, and is now a bigger point of focus for Trojan fans who are suffering through a brutal football season, Gottlieb’s media-specific insights are fascinating to contemplate.
This podcast deals a little with the current USC team, but as a media-oriented show, it focuses mostly on how Gottlieb and USC are handling the media spotlight and its mixture of challenges and opportunities.
Lindsay Gottlieb discusses her interaction with player agents, the role of a general manager within the USC women’s hoops program, the overall program infrastructure, helping players build their brand and maximize both exposure and revenue, and the larger attempt to put basketball first and maintain a team-centered culture amid the commercial pressures of the sport.
Gottlieb also went into detail in explaining the challenge and complexity of scheduling national television games such as the USC-UConn game on Dec. 21 on Fox. That game will have an NFL lead-in, offering considerable visibility to USC women’s basketball.
Gottlieb also talked about the need to balance local and national media obligations, being available for Los Angeles outlets but also being willing to set aside time in a busy day for national media organizations interested in the program due to its prominence and the brilliance of superstar JuJu Watkins.
There’s so much to consider in this discussion. It’s a peek behind the curtain and a look inside the juggling act Gottlieb and other high-profile coaches have to pull off in modern women’s basketball.
Visit our friends at Fighting Irish Wire, Buffaloes Wire, Ducks Wire, UW Huskies Wire and UCLA Wire.
This article originally appeared on Trojans Wire: Lindsay Gottlieb describes the new world of women’s college basketball
