LOS ANGELES — A clever little analogy, she thought.
Could be cute, she thought.
Maybe kinda cool, she thought.
Eleven and the Party? JuJu and the Nerds? Netflix’s hit show and USC’s hit women’s basketball team?
Eleven. No. 12.
El. Ju. (If you’re friends.)
Jane. Judea. (If you’re the government.)
The buzz cut, the bun. The ability to move objects in cool and unexplainable ways, to break arms and ankles. And, bruh, the merchandising!
And, best, the crew. The cast of rootable role players, without whom the premise wouldn’t work. Because you’ve got to have someone with a slingshot ready to fire from the corner. Someone to run interference. To crack jokes. To teach the young phenom some things about the world.
To stick by, to yell it with their chests: “She’s our friend and she’s crazy!” To step up and be the heroes on occasion – like last week, when JuJu Watkins fouled out and “the nerds” saved the day with one big play after another in USC’s double-overtime victory at Arizona.
Came through when we needed her most.
One more look at this clutch triple from @kaylacp_! 💦✌️ pic.twitter.com/116A46rFfq
— USC Women’s Basketball (@USCWBB) March 1, 2024
So I went to a recent practice for a behind-the-scenes look at the players starring alongside freshman sensation JuJu Watkins for the fifth-ranked Trojans – whose season continues Thursday night at the Pac-12 Tournament in Las Vegas, where second-seeded USC will face the winner of Arizona and Washington’s first-round tussle.
“Nerds” is Coach Lindsay Gottlieb’s endearing term to describe her trio of Ivy League graduate transfers: Kaitlyn Davis, McKenzie Forbes and Kayla Padilla, high-IQ hoopers with degrees from Columbia, Harvard and Penn, respectively. Gottlieb gets away with calling them that, ’cause she’s one of them, a former baller at Brown.
You can find interviews of Davis – the 6-foot forward from Connecticut who recorded the first triple-double in…
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