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The art of the nutmeg

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The art of the nutmeg

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“Nutmegs, for me, are a beautiful thing to do,” Javier Pastore, the former Argentina international, said.

“They’re beautiful to watch. In fact, even when I get nutmegged myself I find that beautiful – and that actually happens quite a lot too!”.

Whether using the inside or outside of the foot, or the sole or the heel, Pastore was an absolute master of slipping the ball between an opponent’s legs, creating the illusion that he was running through people at times.

“I think it’s a skill that gives you a lot of possibilities as it eliminates an opposition player,” Pastore, who played for Paris Saint-Germain between 2011 and 2018, said. “I find it much easier to do a little nutmeg and run round the player than to try and dribble around him with the ball.”

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(Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images)

Eliminates is a good word. Humiliates would be another.

There are more elaborate skills on a football pitch, for sure, but it’s hard to think of any other trick that brings one player so much adulation and strips another of their dignity in quite the same way as a nutmeg.

When Jude Bellingham nutmegged Conor Coady before scoring in his first England training session, everyone applauded the teenager. Everyone except Coady, obviously. “I thought, ‘I look like a right plant pot here!’,” Coady told the Ben Foster Podcast when discussing the incident.

Clearly, some nutmegs are more flamboyant than others and, naturally, that brings a whole new level of misery to the player on the receiving end.

The good news for Gary Cahill was that Raphinha’s quite brilliant 270-degree turn and nutmeg on him at Elland Road in 2021 came at a time when football was being played behind closed doors because of the global pandemic.

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The bad news for Cahill was that the footage went viral the next day.

The word nutmeg has been part of football’s lexicon for as long as people can remember.

According to Peter Seddon, author of the book Football Talk – The Language & Folklore Of The World’s Greatest Game, the origin of the term relates to the exportation of actual nutmegs between North America and England in the 1800s.

“Nutmegs were such a valuable commodity that unscrupulous exporters were known to pull a fast one by mixing a helping of wooden replicas into the sacks being shipped to England,” Seddon wrote.

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“Being nutmegged soon came to imply stupidity on the part of the duped victim and cleverness on the part of the trickster.”

All of which fits rather nicely.

Nutmeg.

Panna.

Tunel.

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Cano.

Petit Pont.

Whatever the language, the message remains the same – essentially, you’re making your opponent look like a fool by putting the ball between their legs, even if that wasn’t even the motivation at the time.

“I had a bad touch and I got myself into a situation where I had no other alternatives, so it wasn’t planned,” Scott Hiley tells The Athletic.

“When I got control of the ball again, I didn’t know what to do. I knew I couldn’t just push it and run past him because he was younger and quicker than me. As I was trying to position the ball, I saw his legs were open, so I just had to pull the ball back and put it through.

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“It was me getting myself out of a situation more than me trying to be clever, to be honest.”

Hiley was a non-League footballer for Exeter City at the time and had just nutmegged Manchester United’s Cristiano Ronaldo live on television in the FA Cup. Nineteen years later, his phone still rings about that incident but his trumpet never blows.

“I haven’t dined out on it. But it gets brought up a lot because of the YouTube video, and it’s got bigger and bigger over time because of Ronaldo’s profile,” Hiley adds. “I remember after the game, the newspapers wanted a picture of me with the boot, but I didn’t do any interviews about it. I felt that would be disrespectful.”

At the highest level, the spotlight can be unforgiving for the player who has been embarrassed.

Ask David Luiz about Luis Suarez nutmegging him prior to scoring both of his goals for Barcelona against Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League in 2015 – “I didn’t have a great night,” the Brazilian said with no little understatement – or James Milner about Lionel Messi.

“It’s very hard to run as fast as you can with your legs closed – as I found out,” Milner said in 2019.

Milner was talking about a Champions League game four years earlier, when his Manchester City side played Barcelona at the Camp Nou and his attempts to close down Messi by the touchline ended badly. Messi deftly slipped the ball through his legs, Milner ended up scrambling on his hands, the home crowd roared, and Pep Guardiola, who was the Bayern Munich manager at the time and watching from up in the stands, covered his face. All around him, there was laughter.

“He (Messi) can make you look stupid,” Milner reflected.

Some players appear to be more susceptible to a nutmeg than others.

Data gathered by StatsBomb shows that Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold, together with Aston Villa duo John McGinn and Matty Cash, have the dubious honour of being joint top of the Premier League’s “nutmegged” leaderboard this season.

As for the Premier League’s nutmeg kings, it’s a four-way tie between Luton’s Chiedozie Ogbene, Eberechi Eze of Crystal Palace and the Arsenal wingers Gabriel Martinelli and Bukayo Saka, all of whom should be approached with feet never more than six inches apart.

As silly as that last line sounds, Pastore recalled a Napoli defender coming up to him after a match and admitting he was so “scared” of being nutmegged by him that he had spent the entire game trying to keep his legs together. “That’s why I went past him so easily,” Pastore said.

Probably the most unexpected name on that 2023-24 Premier League table of “nutmeggers” is Everton’s James Garner. The midfielder has a lovely knack of shaping to play a pass down the line, which entices his opponent to step across to attempt to make a block, and then tucking the ball between their legs and escaping. That mixture of disguise and deception opens up the whole pitch for Garner.

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In the first example below, he nutmegs Fulham’s Antonee Robinson and then slips the ball through Harrison Reed’s legs straight afterwards too.

In the second clip, Garner leaves Villa’s Pau Torres looking like he is teetering on the edge of a cliff at one point.

Nutmegs can become a game within a game for some players.

When Tony Mowbray was Sunderland manager, their winger Patrick Roberts kept him updated with his nutmeg tally for the previous three matches. “I think we were at about 10 before the Reading game,” Mowbray said last season.

A Twitter account, presumably run by someone with a calculator at hand, was dedicated to keeping count of the number of times that Adel Taarabt – a serial nutmegger if ever there was one – put a ball through an opponent’s legs while he was playing for Queens Park Rangers.

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“I’m not trying to take the p**s,” Taarabt said. “It’s a skill, it’s so natural.”

As for Dele Alli, he gave the impression earlier in his career that he saw it as a personal challenge to nutmeg as many people as possible whenever he left the house.

Adebayo Akinfenwa, a powerful lower-divisions striker nicknamed The Beast, was one of Dele’s first victims in professional football and spent 10 minutes trying to chase the teenager around the pitch afterwards. “I just wanted to body him,” Akinfenwa said.

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On another occasion, Dele tried to nutmeg Guardiola after the ball ran out of play by the dugout at the Etihad Stadium – he failed but the Manchester City manager saw the funny side.

Then there was the time when Dele had the confidence and audacity to embarrass Real Madrid’s Luka Modric.

Dele, for context, was 19 years old at the time and starting his first game for Spurs having moved from third-tier MK Dons, in front of 70,000 people at the Allianz Arena in Munich, in a pre-season tournament.

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“We had a laugh about it in the tunnel afterwards; he (Modric) was very good about it,” Dele said. “He shook my hand and said to me, ‘You little b***er’ – or something like that.

“I didn’t shout ‘Nuts’ when I did it. I used to do that when I was young and got told off for it.”


Dele nutmegging Huddersfield’s Collin Quaner during a league match in 2018 (Craig Mercer – CameraSport via Getty Images)

Shouting “Nuts”, “Megs”, “Keep ’em shut”, or anything else like that, is like a red rag to a bull for someone who has already been made to look silly.

Within the professional game (different rules may apply at your local five-a-side pitch on a Monday night), those kinds of comments are regarded as disrespectful or, to quote one current Premier League footballer who asked not to be identified for fear of being nutmegged, only made by players “really taking the p**s”.

Erik Lamela versus Andros Townsend, White Hart Lane, 2016.

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“I thought, ‘Erik, why did you do that?’,” his Tottenham team-mate Danny Rose said a few days later. “I didn’t realise I put my hands on my head until afterwards. It was a brilliant nutmeg. When Andros was here (as a Spurs player), he always used to get nutmegged five or six times in a training session. I was actually thinking throughout the game that he’s done well not to get nutmegged today, and (then) Erik did that.”

Why Lamela did that is a good question. Although Spurs fans raucously celebrated the Argentinian’s party trick, which prompted Rose to react in the way that he described and Townsend to set off on a walk of shame, not everyone at the club was impressed.

“I don’t like it when you try to humiliate your opponent,” Mauricio Pochettino, Tottenham’s manager at the time, said. “The supporters enjoy this type of action and that’s a good thing, but it doesn’t create any emotion in me. People tried to nutmeg me when I was playing. But they did it knowing that, afterwards, I would be out to kill them.”

Lamela’s nutmeg crossed that line between being a fantastic piece of skill – he used the sole of the foot, futsal-style, to dupe Townsend – and showboating. It was brilliant and made people in the crowd laugh and smile – as nutmegs generally do. But it also felt gratuitous – there were only seconds of the game remaining.

Does any of that matter?

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Diego Simeone once applauded himself, with the ball at his feet still, after nutmegging then Barcelona captain Jose Mari Bakero twice in quick succession.

Bakero’s blood must have been boiling at the time, in much the same way as Sir Alex Ferguson’s was when a young Paul Gascoigne had the temerity to not just nutmeg Remi Moses in front of the Manchester United dugout but revel in the moment.

“He went up to Remi after he did it and patted him on the head,” Ferguson said, incredulously. “I was out of that dugout — ‘Get that little f***ing so-and-so’.”

A new kid on the block nutmegging an established player can quickly light the touchpaper.

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“Behave!,” a by then much more senior Gascoigne said to Steven Gerrard after the Liverpool midfielder tried and failed to nutmeg him shortly after breaking through at Anfield. Gascoigne, Gerrard writes in his autobiography, also called him “a little runt” afterwards (apparently that’s not a typo in the book).

Where nutmegs are concerned, that chasm in age and experience provides all the ingredients for a potential flashpoint on the training ground too. A nutmeg in a rondo is one thing – most players will see that as fair game – but it’s quite another in a training match, when egos are easily bruised, especially if someone is having a bad day or senses they are being mocked.

In Matthew Spiro’s book Sacre Bleu: Zidane To Mbappe – A Football Journey, the author tells a story about Vikash Dhorasoo, a gifted playmaker, being ostracised by the France squad after nutmegging 1998 World Cup-winning captain Didier Deschamps when called up for the first time the following year.


Dhorasoo, second from left, in France training in 2006 (Pascal Pavani/AFP via Getty Images)

Although Dhorasoo’s own memory of that incident is hazy – “I hope I did it. For me, nutmegs are the essence of football,” he told Spiro – Marcel Desailly, another France player, was quoted in Liberation newspaper at the time confirming that it happened. “Vikash is an… interesting boy,” Desailly said. “As for the nutmeg on Didier, given the quality of Vikash’s performances in training, I would say it was not especially appropriate.”

An inappropriate nutmeg is an interesting concept and, presumably, captures how Neymar saw things when Weverton Guilherme, a 19-year-old right-back, slipped the ball through his legs with a lovely sole-roll at a Brazil training camp before the Copa America in 2019. Neymar grabbed Weverton by the bib, threw him to the floor and walked away in a huff.

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Neymar, of course, has never nutmegged anyone.

What is clear is that the simple act of putting a ball through an opponent’s legs means different things to different people and how they react depends, to a large extent, on the circumstances at the time and even the event’s location on the pitch.

That said, it’s hard to imagine an England manager ever talking about the importance of nutmegs in the way that Lionel Scaloni did after his Argentina side won the World Cup in 2022.

“If I’m constantly telling young players to play two-touch football, I’m taking away their inventiveness – that’s the best asset,” Scaloni said on football interview show Universo Valdano. “Our football culture is about mischief, taking on players, doing nutmegs and looking for one-twos. You can’t manage players with a joystick.”

Mischief and nutmegs sounds like a lot of fun, and it’s easy to imagine what it looks like in Argentina too.

Picture Juan Roman Riquelme famously backheeling the ball through the legs of Mario Yepes in a Copa Libertadores quarter-final in 2000, Lautaro Martinez’s extraordinary pinball skill in 2018, or Lucas Ocampos executing one of the most nonchalant nutmegs you will ever see.

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Not all nutmegs need to be a work of art, though.

In fact, there is something deeply satisfying about watching one player effortlessly glide away from another by cutting across, and slipping the ball through, their opponent’s stride pattern.

Expert timing or an element of good luck?

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Either way, Luis Suarez was a master of that manoeuvre and it’s also become a go-to nutmeg for the game’s inverted wingers, who will typically carry the ball with their stronger foot and dart inside using the outside of that same boot.

In the example below, which is taken from Arsenal’s 4-3 victory at Kenilworth Road in December, Saka takes two Luton players out of the game with that type of nutmeg.

A popular and alternative nutmeg for inverted wingers is the push-and-run with the instep, which is hugely effective from a stationary position because all the forward momentum is with the attacker, leaving their opponent flat-footed once they are, in football parlance, squared up.

Both Saka, who is shown against Wolves below, and Martinelli have used that move multiple times this season.

Yet it was a nutmeg that was performed on an Arsenal player a month ago that caused a much bigger stir – and not just because of what happened on the pitch.

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There was less than a minute of stoppage time remaining when Sergino Dest picked up the ball wide on the right for PSV Eindhoven.

What followed was Ronaldinho-esque – a nutmeg orchestrated by a lovely piece of footwork that bamboozled a defender, luring him into trying to win a ball that was going in a totally different direction to where he thought and, crucially, opening his legs in the process.

As Arsenal’s Jakub Kiwior stepped across, Dest nutmegged him, to the delight of the crowd – except that wasn’t the full story.

In a world increasingly obsessed with reactions, the replay of the responses from those on the PSV bench generated more headlines than the nutmeg itself. Johan Bakayoko’s jaw was close to the floor as he turned around to grab a team-mate in disbelief, while Ismael Saibari looked like he had just witnessed something from another universe.

Naturally, TikTok had a field day.

Branded “absolute filth” on the Champions League TikTok account (that was almost certainly not the phrase used at the 1978 World Cup when Scotland’s Archie Gemmill beautifully slipped the ball through Jan Poortvliet’s legs against the Netherlands), United States international Dest’s nutmeg was approaching one million likes at the last count.

Gemmill is worth referencing here because he said something interesting about that iconic nutmeg, which led to arguably the greatest goal in Scotland’s history — and even features in the 1996 film Trainspotting.

“You can’t plan it (the nutmeg). It’s just instinct,” Gemmill explained. “I didn’t think about putting it through one player’s legs or going one way or the other; you make your decisions when the opposition players make theirs. So when Jan Poortvliet slid in, I just knocked it past him.”

That is certainly true in the case of a lot of nutmegs – Milner’s frenzied chasing prior to confronting Messi, for example, or David Luiz stepping out against Suarez. But what Dest did was different because he provoked Kiwior into opening his legs to be nutmegged.

Now, by the way, is not the time for coaches to ask: “But what happened after Dest’s nutmeg?”.

The fact that Dest’s near-post cross came to nothing is neither here nor there in the social media age.

Never mind the end product, nutmegs go down well on social media regardless and it’s easy to see why, bearing in mind we’re talking about a short clip where one person showcases their talent to prank another, makes them look like a buffoon and everyone laughs at their expense.

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From Champions League nights to an unsuspecting member of the public having a ball slipped between their legs while walking through a shopping mall, nowhere is off-limits in an age when everyone has a camera in their hand.

Before you roll your eyes at the dumbing down of one of football’s oldest tricks, it’s worth remembering that no self-respecting parent has missed the opportunity to nutmeg their child at some point, ideally not long after they start walking, and for reasons that can’t really be explained.

Leaving aside the more important debate about whether a shot or a pass through someone’s legs qualifies as a true nutmeg (yes, Leeds fans, we haven’t forgotten that eye-of-the-needle through ball that Pablo Hernandez played against Charlton in the 2020 promotion-winning season or, for that matter, the Spaniard’s double nutmeg on Callum O’Dowda on the opening day in the same campaign), some would question whether a nutmeg really counts if the other person isn’t paying attention at the time.

Not Rio Ferdinand, though.

“How dare you try and get away with it. Don’t even try to go to any link,” Ferdinand joked on-camera after nutmegging Laura Woods, the TNT Sports presenter, on her Champions League debut programme in September as she walked across the pitch.

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“Laura Woods has been megged,” Ferdinand continued as the broadcaster showed a replay.

The joke was on Ferdinand the year before, however, when he ran into Jack Downer.

Aged 25, Downer is a football freestyler, internet sensation and two-time Panna World Champion. In other words, he is the closest thing there is to a professional “nutmegger” and has spent more than a decade practising and perfecting them.

Downer had tied in knots and nutmegged Neymar (who reacted with laughter on this occasion), Riyad Mahrez and Patrice Evra before he exposed Ferdinand too.

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What a way to earn a living.

“Panna is essentially like boxing, but football,” Downer explained in an interview with UK newspaper The Daily Mirror. “It’s one-on-one, it originated in Amsterdam, and when you compete it’s a three-minute game. Each player has a small goal in a cage and the most goals in three minutes wins. However, if you nutmeg the opponent, that’s an instant knockout.”

Mentally, the same applies in the real game too.

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)

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Culture

Always on the move, Rickey Henderson leaves legacy as one of baseball’s greatest showmen

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December 23, 2024

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Always on the move, Rickey Henderson leaves legacy as one of baseball’s greatest showmen

“What Jimmy really loved to do? What he really loved to do was steal. I mean, he actually enjoyed it. Jimmy was the kind of guy who rooted for the bad guy in the movies.” — Ray Liotta as Henry Hill

That’s a quote from “Goodfellas,” which premiered in September 1990, when the Oakland A’s were reigning champions and Rickey Henderson was the most electrifying player in baseball. That was his best season, too, and at the start of the next one, he broke Lou Brock’s career record for stolen bases.

Henderson yanked the base from the Coliseum dirt and raised it to the sky. He thanked God, the A’s and the city. He thanked family, fans and managers. Then, with Brock standing beside him, Henderson declared: “Today, I am the greatest of all time.”

That night, 1700 miles away in Texas, Nolan Ryan broke his own record for no-hitters with seven. The irresistible contrast made for a lazy talking point: the humble, stoic Ryan had upstaged the vain, cocky Henderson. Low-hanging fruit at its most sour.

Henderson, who died Friday at age 65, was the bad guy in that movie — and sure, he brought it on himself. He whined about being underpaid. He often referred to himself in the third person. He wore fluorescent green batting gloves. He popped his collar and shimmied on home run trots. He slashed the air after catching fly balls, his glove like Zorro’s blade.

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And all of it — the contract stuff notwithstanding — was awesome.

“In my way of playing the game, people have called me a hot dog,” Henderson once said. “But I call it (bringing) some style or entertainment to the people. I enjoy going out there and exciting the fans, because I feel like they come out here to see some excitement.”

Was any player ever more exciting than Rickey Henderson? Was anyone a better entertainer? Certainly, no one outside of the movies loved stealing as much as Henderson or succeeded so grandly at it.

Henderson finished with 1,406 stolen bases. His last came in August 2003, for the Dodgers, off a Colorado pitcher named Cory Vance who was born in June 1979. That was the same month as Henderson’s very first steal, in his major-league debut for the A’s.

In some ways, Henderson was a lot more like Ryan than it seemed. Both played in four decades, into their mid-40s. Henderson led his league in stolen bases 12 times; Ryan led his league in strikeouts 12 times. Henderson is the only player with more than 1,000 steals; Ryan is the only pitcher with more than 5,000 strikeouts. (Henderson, in fact, was strikeout victim No. 5,000.)

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But here’s the difference: as freakishly dominant as Ryan was in strikeouts, Henderson was far more prolific in stolen bases. Ryan has 17.2 percent more strikeouts than Randy Johnson, who ranks second. Henderson has 49.8 percent more stolen bases than Brock.

Here’s another way to frame that: Let’s say Henderson’s career had ended in 1993, which would have been a fitting capper. Henderson, then with Toronto, drew a leadoff walk in the bottom of the ninth inning in Game 6 of the World Series, causing the Phillies’ Mitch Williams to try a slide-step motion to hold him on. Joe Carter took advantage with a clinching home run.

(In his absorbing biography of Henderson — “Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original” — Howard Bryant tells a great story from the following season, after Henderson had re-joined the A’s. On a trip to Toronto, players and staff reminisced about where they were when Carter hit his homer. Henderson shouted from the back of the bus: “I was on second base!”)

Through 1993 Henderson had 1,095 career steals, about 17 percent more than Brock — the same as Ryan’s strikeout edge over Johnson. But Henderson then stuck around for another decade as a speedster for hire.

He bounced back to Oakland, then to San Diego, the Angels, Oakland again, the Mets, Seattle, the Padres again, Boston and Los Angeles. He kept running even when the big leagues stopped calling, swiping 53 more bases for independent teams in Newark and San Diego.

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All that speed naturally found its way to the plate. Henderson scored 2,295 runs, another record, just above Ty Cobb, Barry Bonds, Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth. When he set the mark in 2001, with a homer for the Padres, Henderson trotted around the bases – and then slid into home.

“It was feet-first and he was always a head-first guy; that caught us more off-guard than anything,” said Ben Davis, a catcher on that team. “But you never put anything past Rickey. I mean, that year, think about it: he got his 3,000th hit, he got the all-time walks record and he got the all-time runs scored record. The walks record was broken by Barry, but that’s unbelievable, to do all that in one year.”

Henderson was 42 then but still managed 25 stolen bases, the most ever for that age. His single-season record of 130, set in 1982, has never been seriously challenged. Even with new rules to encourage base stealing, last year’s leader, Cincinnati’s Elly De La Cruz, had just 67.

Besides Henderson, only one other modern player, Vince Coleman, has three seasons with 100 steals. After Henderson passed Brock, Coleman, then with the Mets, mused about his own chances. He thought he could do it.

“He knows I’ll be chasing his record, just like I’m chasing all the other records,” Coleman told the (Bridgewater, NJ) Courier-News. “If I stay healthy, I’m gonna average 80, 90, 100 steals a season.”

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Coleman never topped 50 steals again. He finished hundreds shy of Henderson, and yet still had a standout career: his total, 752, is sixth all-time. Ultimately, Coleman lacked the on-base component that eludes so many base stealers. Of the 20 players with 500 steals since 1930, more than half had a career OBP under .350.

Henderson’s was .401. Only one modern player with 500 stolen bases, Bonds, reached base more at a higher rate. And while Bonds is easily the game’s greatest living player, Henderson was probably the greatest living Hall of Famer at the time of his death. The only others even in the conversation would have been Mike Schmidt or a pitcher like Johnson, Greg Maddux or Steve Carlton.

It’s jarring now to look at the career leaderboard in wins above replacement. The only living players above Schmidt, who is tied for 24th with Nap Lajoie, are Bonds, Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez, whose careers were tarnished by ties to steroids. The extraordinary volume of high-impact performance is just so hard to achieve.

Henderson did it. He hit from a crouch with a refined approach that would play in any era: a seven-time league leader in walks, he also slammed a half-season’s worth of leadoff homers with a record 81, plus another in the postseason.

That came in Game 4 of the World Series in 1989, the year the A’s brought Henderson back from the Yankees in a midseason trade. That October was his showcase: a .441/.568/.941 slash line with 11 steals in 12 tries. The A’s lost just once on their way to a championship.

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Henderson led off the clincher against San Francisco’s Don Robinson. He took two balls. With a thunderous lineup behind him, he could have worked the count. Instead he swung hard at a fastball down the middle, lashing it over the left field fence. The A’s never trailed in that World Series as they romped to a sweep.

It was their last title representing Oakland, Henderson’s hometown. Eventually the team named the Coliseum’s field in his honor, though he never got his own statue — too much permanence, perhaps, for a franchise with a wandering eye.

Now the A’s are gone, off to Las Vegas by way of Sacramento, and Henderson is gone, too. Wednesday will mark 66 years since his birth, on Christmas night 1958 in the backseat of an Oldsmobile on the way to a hospital in Chicago. He was a man on the move from the very start.

Dash away, dash away, dash away all.

(Top photo of Henderson after he broke MLB’s single-season stolen-base record in 1982: Getty Images)

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Why USC’s win over UConn is so significant: ‘This is what basketball excellence was’

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December 22, 2024

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Why USC’s win over UConn is so significant: ‘This is what basketball excellence was’

HARTFORD, Conn. — As USC’s bench emptied onto the XL Center floor, with the No. 7 Trojans having defeated the No. 4 UConn Huskies 72-70, JuJu Watkins’ hands shot to the sky. Basking in her 25-point performance that lifted USC past UConn for the first time in school history, Watkins turned to the small section of supporters decked out in red and yellow inside the sold-out arena and acknowledged their support.

“It hit a little different knowing the history from last year and how they sent us home,” Watkins said.

The stakes were different this time. In April, in the Elite Eight, the Huskies knocked the top-seeded Trojans out of the NCAA Tournament. But Saturday night’s 2-point victory was meaningful nevertheless. Not only for Watkins and USC senior transfer Kiki Iriafen, but for their coach, Lindsay Gottlieb, who has long admired the program UConn coach Geno Auriemma has built.

“This is a really significant win, and it’s a really significant win because of the stature of UConn’s program and what Geno Auriemma has done for our sport,” Gottlieb said. “For my entire high school (career) on, this is what basketball excellence was. This is what we saw, and it’s challenged all of us to want to be better, to find players who want to be better and be that elite. And I don’t think that’s gone away.”

Gottlieb is in her fourth season with the Trojans, and she aspires to build a sustained program similar to the Huskies. A season ago, USC won its second Pac-12 tournament title in program history and made consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances for the first time in nearly two decades. Over her brief tenure, she has reminded onlookers not only of USC’s history of success — two national titles and three Final Four appearances in the 1980s, Hall of Fame players such as Lisa Leslie, Cynthia Cooper, Cheryl Miller and Tina Thompson — but of what it can be in the present. Watkins, last year’s national freshman of the year and a first-team All-American, is at the center of the latest chapter. Victories like Saturday’s help make lofty aspirations feel more attainable.

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USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb wants to emulate what Geno Auriemma has built in Connecticut. (David Butler II / Imagn Images)

Gottlieb grew up just outside New York City, but she wasn’t recruited by Auriemma in high school. Nevertheless, when she was 15 or 16, she accompanied one of her friends to one of his camps. UConn was always the local draw, and following Saturday’s win, she recalled a trip she made during her senior year at Brown University, in nearby Providence, Rhode Island, when she and her father drove to Storrs to see UConn take on Tennessee.

“It was sold out,” Gottlieb said, “and I was in that building and saw this atmosphere.”

Saturday was raucous, too. And Watkins, USC’s star guard, said it might have been the largest crowd she has played in front of. Nearly 16,000 people packed inside XL Center, almost all of whom wore navy and white.

Still, Watkins added, “just to see my family here, all the SC fans, it meant the world.”

If anyone needed reminding, the Trojans’ victory reinforced their status as one of this season’s national title contenders. At 11-1, their lone defeat came at home to Notre Dame by 13 points. It would have been easy, Gottlieb said, for those inside the program to blame each other after that November loss — for the Trojans to fracture.

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“As long as we stick together, this can make us better,” she said she told them afterward. “And (the loss) has in every way.”

Entering Saturday’s victory, the Trojans sported the country’s third-best defense and No. 15 offense. They convert in transition (nearly 20 percent of their points come in transition) and off turnovers (averaging 28.7 points per game), important measurables that could serve them well in the future. Their victory over the Huskies reinforced that they could come on the road, in one of the most-anticipated games of the season, and punch first. It proved they could surrender a 13-point halftime lead, trail by a point with just under five minutes to play and still recover.

“No one got off the treadmill,” Gottlieb said.

Of course, having a transcendent star like Watkins helps calm any nerves. Not only did she lead the game in scoring, she added six rebounds, five assists and three blocks, including one just before halftime on UConn star Paige Bueckers. Bueckers was prolific in the second half and finished with 22 points, but she also guarded Watkins as the USC star got off to a fast start in the first quarter.

“Every scouting report that you put together or every film that you watch, it’s very evident that one player can’t guard (Watkins),” Auriemma said. “When she gets into a little bit of a rhythm, you have to hope she misses.”

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With the score within one possession with only 4:30 to play, Watkins recorded 6 of USC’s 8 points and assisted forward Rayah Marshall on the lone basket she didn’t score.

“A lot of the things she does is super hard, but she makes it look so easy,” Iriafen said. “We all know she is a superstar, so playing with her definitely relieves pressure on everybody else.”

Any remnants of pressure dissipated even further in the postgame locker room. Players doused Gottlieb with water as she entered. They leaped together in celebration.

“For me now to bring a team here, to know we could do it, and then to actually do it is incredibly meaningful,” Gottlieb said. “Really proud of the big win.”

(Top photo of JuJu Watkins driving between Paige Bueckers, left, and Kaitlyn Chen: Joe Buglewicz / Getty Images)

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Penn State, Louisville volleyball will make history in NCAA championship. Their coaches are why

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December 22, 2024

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Penn State, Louisville volleyball will make history in NCAA championship. Their coaches are why

LOUISVILLE, Ky.  — What’s remarkable is not that two women are coaching for the national championship and one will win a title for the first time in the 44 years of NCAA women’s volleyball. It’s remarkable that these women, Katie Schumacher-Cawley and Dani Busboom Kelly, are the two doing it.

Because they are the ideal representatives.

In this historic moment, as Schumacher-Cawley at Penn State and Louisville’s Busboom Kelly match wits before a sold-out KFC Yum! Center and a national ABC audience on Sunday at 3 p.m., they are the embodiment of what it takes to get to the top in an industry dominated by men.

Eighteen of the 20 winningest coaches in Division I women’s volleyball history are men.

“It’s going to be awesome for the sport to get this monkey off its back and move on from this, where it’s not historic that a woman wins,” said Busboom Kelly, 39, in her eighth season and making a second trip to the national championship match with the Cardinals. “It’s just a regular thing.”

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Penn State (34-2) and Louisville (30-5) reflect their coaches’ drive and resilience. They won national semifinal matches on Thursday against Nebraska and Pittsburgh, respectively, in dramatic fashion.

Schumacher-Cawley and Busboom Kelly both coached with a steady hand. They fostered confidence from the sideline as their squads’ manufactured comebacks against opponents considered to rank first and second nationally in talent, depth and championship-level experience.

GO DEEPER

Penn State, Louisville set to meet for women’s volleyball national title

The Nittany Lions pulled a five-set reverse sweep, fighting off two match points for Nebraska in the fourth set.

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At the start of the decisive fifth set, junior libero Gillian Grimes heard a voice of reassurance in the Penn State huddle: “We’re made for this.” The phrase didn’t come from Schumacher-Cawley. But she is why it was spoken.

Louisville players faced pressure all season to earn a spot in the Final Four at home. As stress rose when Pitt won the opening set and took the lead in the second, Busboom Kelly implored the Cardinals to keep their composure.

“This is going to start to work,” she said.

Without star attacker Anna DeBeer, the senior was injured two points into the fourth set, they swarmed Pitt after turning back three set points for the Panthers in the third.

In short, Penn State and Louisville refused to go away. They kept taking huge swings. They played to win.

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“We’re not talking about losing ever,” Penn State outside hitter Jess Mruzik. “We’re never counting ourselves out, no matter how big of a deficit we’re facing.”

In matches played in front of an NCAA-postseason record crowd of 21,726, Penn State and Louisville were the tougher teams.

Is it any surprise, considering the coaches?

“Women are tough,” said Nebraska coach John Cook, who’s won four national championships. “And those two are really tough. Look at them as players. They both won national championships, so this isn’t a fluke. These guys are winners. They’re great competitors. And their teams play like it.”

Schumacher-Cawley, 44, is a Chicago brand of tough. She grew up in the city and starred in multiple sports at Mother McAuley High. She played at Penn State, earned two All-America honors and won a national championship, the school’s first in women’s volleyball, in 1999 for coach Russ Rose.

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Rose won six more titles. He’s the all-time leader in championships and wins among Division I coaches. In 2008, Schumacher-Cawley was inducted into the Chicagoland Hall of Fame in a class alongside Dick Butkus, Gale Sayers and Andre Dawson.

She ran the program at Illinois-Chicago for eight seasons and returned to Penn State to work for Rose in 2018 — four years after the Nittany Lions’ most recent Final Four appearance until last week.

Schumacher Cawley took over when Rose retired in 2022.

“Following Russ Rose, to take the team back to the Final Four in just three years,” Busboom Kelly said, “take being a man or woman out of it, that’s an amazing accomplishment.”

Early in her third season this fall, Schumacher-Cawley revealed a Stage 2 breast cancer diagnosis and she began chemotherapy. She lost her hair but did not miss a practice with her team.

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“We’re obviously wanting to do this for her because she’s been so amazing throughout this season,” said Mruzik, who hammered a match-best 26 kills against Nebraska. “So that gritty five-set win helped put another brick into the piece that we’re trying to build this season.”

Schumacher-Cawley deflects questions about her health and the gender issue in coaching.

“I’m just really excited to represent Penn State,” she said.

Maybe it’ll sink in, she said, the magnitude of two women on the bench, both in charge with a trophy on the court, when they step out under the lights Sunday.

“I’m proud of this team,” Schumacher-Cauley said. “I think I’ve said that every day. I’m proud of their fight.”

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The fight transcends volleyball.


Louisville coach Dani Busboom Kelly was the 2021 AVCA national coach of the year. (Sam Upshaw Jr. / Courier Journal / USA Today via Imagn Images)

When Busboom Kelly took over at Louisville in 2017, she doubled the Cardinals’ win total, from 12 to 24, in one season.

In 2019, Louisville advanced to the round of eight for the first time. In 2021, Busboom Kelly was named the national coach of the year as the Cardinals went undefeated until the Final Four, losing in five sets against Wisconsin. A year later, Texas beat Louisville for the national championship.

“She’s led one of the great turnarounds in any college volleyball program,” Cook said.

Busboom Kelly played for Cook at Nebraska from 2003 to 2006. He recruited her off a farm near Cortland Neb. She was a multi-sport star at tiny Adams Freeman High School.

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In college, she moved from setter to libero and helped spark the Huskers, alongside future Olympians Jordan Larson and Sarah Pavan, to a national championship in 2006. She won another title with Cook and the Huskers as an assistant coach in 2015.

A year later, she took over at Louisville.

“I hope people appreciate what she’s done here,” Cook said.

Louisville fans appreciate Busboom Kelly, based on the reception Thursday that she and the Cardinals received.

“I think the last time I was on the mic talking about Dani, I called her a badass,” Louisville middle blocker Phekran Kong said Friday at the news conference to preview the championship. “So I’m going to double down on that one. Because she’s legit.”

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In the fourth set on Thursday, after DeBeer left with the injury that could keep the senior All-American out of the championship match, middle blocker Cara Cresse promised Busboom Kelly that she would deliver two blocks.

Cresse produced. Momentum flipped. The Panthers fell apart late in the match. Even sophomore opposite hitter Olivia Babcock, crowned Friday as the national player of the year, felt the pressure. The Cardinals embraced it.

“This is for all the people who doubted us,” Louisville outside hitter Charitie Luper said.

Her coach looked on and smiled.

More than to shatter a glass ceiling on Sunday, Busbom Kelly said, she’s excited that a woman will coach her team to the national championship so that athletic directors and future players who might go into coaching understand that it can be done.

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“It’s more just being really proud that we can be role models,” she said, “and hopefully blazing new trails.”

(Top photo of Schumacher-Cawley: Dan Rainville / USA Today via Imagn Images

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