Could trailblazer Caitlin Clark be a mentor to USC's JuJu Watkins?

Indiana Fever recruit Caitlin Clark, left, and USC star JuJu Watkins, right, are different types of players, but they’re “just as magnetic,” as coach Lindsay Gottlieb said USC women’s basketball team. Both have helped elevate the audience around women’s basketball to levels never seen before. (Photos by Associated Press and Getty Images)

LOS ANGELES — In late April, Lindsay Gottlieb met Caitlin Clark for the first time, the next face of the WNBA humbly passing her college crown to Gottlieb’s 18-year-old freshman at USC.

They met at the Wooden Awards at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, with JuJu Watkins being a finalist for the Wooden Award trophy which Clark ultimately took home. It was brief, Gottlieb recalled, with Clark telling Watkins and Gottlieb that she wished she and Iowa had the chance to play USC in the NCAA tournament.

But Clark’s composure in speaking with Watkins stayed with Gottlieb long after that meeting, a weightless star despite movement on his shoulders, as the USC head coach considers how best to coach a player who could soon achieve the stardom that Clark exploited.

“She told me, ‘I’ve had this attention for a year and a half, two years,'” Gottlieb said, remembering Clark’s words to Watkins.

“She told JuJu, ‘You’re going to have it for the next three.'”

When Gottlieb met Clark for the second time on Thursday, as the Indiana Fever came to practice at USC’s Galen Center before Friday night’s highly anticipated game against the Sparks, a whole world had changed in less than an instant. month. Clark is now a rookie, still searching for her first WNBA win after five games, trying to adjust to the physicality of professional basketball while enduring the same expectations she had at the college level. Embroiled in a storm of speeches about financial growth and charter flights, Clark blinked blearily during post-practice interviews Thursday, with Twitter users pointing out how brutally tired she looked.

But as Gottlieb and her young son Jordan — a budding women’s hoops superfan — stood on the sidelines Thursday, Clark waved them off, in another interaction that simply floored Gottlieb.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before, where a player, five games into his rookie season, is getting all kinds of attention from every angle,” Gottlieb told the Southern California News Group on Friday. “And that’s why I think I was so blown away by her. For example, there was nothing wrong with his interaction with us.

Clark and Watkins, by nature, are totally different players, as Gottlieb noted. But they are “just as magnetic,” as Gottlieb puts it. Both continued to elevate the audience around women’s basketball to never-before-seen levels in 2023-24, with Watkins just a little further behind Clark, arguably the two most captivating scorers in college basketball. Both were also constantly aware of their influence, inspiring a new generation of young fans – particularly young women – amid a swarm of autographs and media attention.

And with Clark gone to the WNBA, Watkins’ profile will only rise, especially as USC prepares to play its games on the Big Ten Network. At last week’s Big Ten meetings, Gottlieb said, FOX executives in the room told him that the network’s coverage of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Baltimore Ravens on Dec. 21 would lead directly to USC-UConn — a time slot that another network might normally reserve. a program like “60 Minutes”.

“For JuJu, there aren’t a lot of people who probably understand what his life could be like,” Gottlieb mused Friday. “And Caitlin is one of them.”

Gottlieb is often referred to as a basketball junkie, a veteran of the women’s college ranks and the NBA who took a rare day off during her time at Cal to go to a Golden State Warriors practice to try to soak in of an overview. However, while watching film, she strives to surround herself with voices who can help her best advise Watkins, in the years to come, reaching a level in the college game that few have reached.

And on Thursday, unprompted, Clark took Gottlieb’s phone and put herself in the coach’s contacts.

“I’ll definitely use her as a resource, if she wants,” Gottlieb said. “I think it’s just a good thing. And I think it’s really cool of her to be willing to pay it forward, so to speak, and help someone else.