LOS ANGELES — Early on Monday, USC women’s basketball coach Lindsay Gottlieb texted JuJu Watkins, setting a time to go over a particularly ugly batch of film with her freshman prodigy.
USC had just suffered its worst loss of the season against Washington on Sunday, relative to expectation, a game in which the slumping Watkins had shot 8 for 27. Gottlieb, the three-year architect of USC’s rebuild and former Cleveland Cavaliers assistant, is not one to play games or mince words; she wanted to catch Watkins before their team-wide film session Monday. Except Watkins had rehab. So there was no chance to brace her for tape that wouldn’t be pretty, for words that might not be pretty, Watkins in the midst of a 5-for-31 stretch from 3-point range.
And that day, Gottlieb moved film before their lift. Before their practice. We need to watch it, she told the group, assembled. It needs to be painful. And then we need to move on.
In that moment, Gottlieb looked at Watkins. The freshman didn’t drop her gaze. Watkins looked right back. Direct eye contact. They shared a moment, the faces of the resurgence of women’s basketball at USC, a kind of unspoken acknowledgement shared between an 18-year-old and a veteran coach: I got you.
“The ‘I’m with you’ – for a young player, it sets the tone for the team,” Gottlieb recalled Saturday afternoon. “And from that moment, I was like, ‘We’re gonna be good.’”
She couldn’t have possibly predicted just how good.
Friday night at Stanford was the moment Watkins truly wrangled the basketball world by the neck and didn’t let go, the teenager who’s picked up an entire program’s legacy and placed it on her shoulders, buzz exploding as she wheeled her way to one of the better regular-season performances in collegiate women’s basketball history.
After a dizzying array of midrange triple-threats and transition pull-up 3-pointers in the No. 15 Trojans’ momentous upset of No. 4 Stanford, two late free…
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