Sparks Co-owner Kathy Goodman will check in twice a month to give Sparks fans "The Good Stuff" from her perspective on Sparks basketball, women's basketball and the sport as a whole.

March 11, 2009:

If you haven’t been watching women’s basketball in the last two weeks, well, what have you been doing? Our draft is a month away and if anyone tells you they know who Atlanta is picking first, they’re not telling you the truth. So many players are making a case for themselves in the Conference Finals that the NCAA Tournament should be incredible. As I was watching the second overtime in the Rutgers/Louisville game—in the FIRST ROUND of the Big East Tournament—I thought, “OK, here’s Kia Vaughn coming alive—she is not going to let this game get away from her.” She demanded the ball down low, got key rebounds and steals, did what she needed to do. But there was Angel McCoughtry, who clearly was not finished playing yet. She took over in the end, scored enough points to match her jersey number and then took care of Pittsburgh the next night. Marissa Coleman and Kristi Toliver at Maryland? If you saw Marissa shouting at her team to “Come on!!” pounding her chest and pumping her fist, then you know how much the ACC Championship meant to her.

I can’t wait to see Stanford and Cal, ASU and Oregon, UCLA and USC going at it at the end of this week down at the Galen Center. Cal may have hit some bumps at the end of the regular season, but “one and done” tournament play gives every team a chance to pull out a Cinderella win against a higher ranked opponent. Stanford seems like the team to beat—and if it does pull out a tournament win, then it will be hard not to rank them the number one seed in the West for the NCAA Tournament. No matter how it turns out, I am sure there will be some exciting West Coast style basketball at Galen. (As for the NCAA Tournament, well, will anyone be able to beat UConn? Even Courtney Paris’s scholarship bet may not be enough incentive to overcome their dominance. I love an underdog, though, so I always root for an upset! Except when the Sparks are involved, of course.)

There are a couple of other women’s sports creating a buzz in Southern California as well. For those of you who were at our playoff game at Galen last season, we introduced the newest professional female athletes in LA, the members of the Los Angeles Sol. The new incarnation of women’s professional soccer kicks off on March 29 at the Home Depot Center in Carson. I have my season seats (we supporters of women’s sports need to stick together) and I am looking forward to seeing the great talent they have assembled. On the amateur side, the USA Team Handball Association is looking to build a competitive team for the 2012 and 2016 Olympics. If your TiVo of the women’s Olympic basketball spilled over to other coverage, you probably saw some Team Handball games—they are sort of a cross between basketball and lacrosse. The USA Team Handball Association is looking for high school juniors and senior athletes to compete on their U18 national team. You don’t need to have played before—they tell me the best crossover athletes are those who have played basketball, volleyball, water polo or lacrosse—sports that usually require height and quickness. If you’re interested, check out their website at www.usateamhandball.org, or check for info at our website about the game and the open tryouts on March 29.

Got to prep for the most intense month of women’s college ball now. Oh, and don’t move too far from your computers—you can expect some exciting Sparks news this week about our upcoming season.

February 23, 2009:

We’re about four months from the start of WNBA season, which also corresponds with the final four months of school for the high school seniors I teach. My students and I all spend our time counting the days remaining until June—each for our slightly different purposes. Their milestones are the days they come to class excited because they have been accepted by their first choice college; I come in excited because we have closed a great sponsorship deal, reached our ticket sales goal for a particular week, or have locked in a player we need to vie for the championship in a few months. I assume everyone has read that we have re-signed DeLisha Milton-Jones for a multi-year contract—she is one of the reasons I came to class excited this week. (Two-time Olympic gold medalist, two-time WNBA Champion, two-time WNBA All-Star—hard to be anything but excited!)

Of course, this time of year is also exciting for any fan of college hoops, because we’re getting down to tournament time. It’s the time of year that separates the good players from the great—as all the pressure of the season comes down to Conference Finals, NCAA Selection Monday and then the Big Dance. I have often reminisced about the NCAA Finals I attended in the early 1990’s as a Stanford fan at the LA Sports Arena—USC’s basketball venue at the time. I got tickets a couple of weeks before from Ticketmaster and had pretty good seats. Now I basically had to buy a WNBA team to ensure admission to the NCAA Women’s Tournament.

We’re pretty lucky in LA this year, though, that the new USC basketball venue, The Galen Center, is hosting the Women’s Pac-10 tournament. Our southern California teams may be re-tooling, but the Stanford/Cal rivalry has catapulted them not only to the top of the Pac 10, but also to the top of the national rankings, and we all know there is nothing better than seeing teams like that battle live. And don’t count out USC and UCLA—come tournament time, anything can happen. So, keep an eye on our website for info on getting tickets to the Pac-10 tournament on March 12-15 at the Galen Center. There will definitely be exciting basketball—consider it the WNBA pre-pre-season. (By the way, for fans of the men’s Pac-10 tournament out there, you can watch that live at Staples Center—and you should know that underneath all the decals, it is the Sparks basketball floor that the boys will be playing on.)

I have to sign off now, so I can go check in with Penny to see what roster developments might make me excited next week. I can guarantee you that there’s always something interesting going on in the WNBA. And I want to end with one last clarifying note to the Rebkellians who have found this blog—I absolutely did not intend any disrespect to you in my first blog entry. I read the site regularly and with great interest (and am convinced that my mother is posting under some alias that she won’t reveal to me, even though she vigorously denies it.)

February 11, 2009:

Last week we celebrated the 23rd Annual Girls and Women in Sports Day. It was first celebrated in 1986, when Ronald Reagan was President and Nancy Lieberman became the first woman to play professional basketball in a men’s league, when she played for USBL’s Springfield Flame. Twenty-three years later, we celebrated with two big events in women’s basketball: Lisa Leslie’s announcement of her final WNBA season and Pat Summit’s 1000th victory. Both events were so fitting for last week since both Lisa and Coach Summitt are the very embodiment of everything good about women’s participation in sports.

Let me start with Coach Summitt. I have to admit that I am not easily intimidated or star struck. Before I taught school, I worked in the film business and met my share of movie stars. That was all fine with me. But then there was the night Carla and I were invited to the Wooden Awards, when Candace won, and Pat Summitt was in attendance. Someone asked us if we wanted to meet Coach Summitt and I wasn’t sure I did. I was sort of scared of her when I watched her on television in my living room staring down her players, so the idea of being in the same room…. But I try never to pass on the chance to shake hands with a legend, so I said yes. Of course, I had forgotten that Coach Summitt is from the South, so she was absolutely filled with Southern charm and I was completely won over. (An unmatchable win record and southern charm? No wonder she can recruit anyone she wants.)

We all knew Coach Summitt would reach 1000 wins—she won too often to make it seem anything but absolutely inevitable—but there are certain facts that made her accomplishment particularly astounding. First, I read on ESPN that in her entire 34 year coaching tenure, her longest losing streak is 3 games. That is a coach who knows how to win. The other almost unbelievable statistic I read is that she has never had a player who has not appeared in at least one Final Four during their four years at Tennessee. A lot has been written about her longevity as a coach being the key to her 1000 wins, but she has coached fewer seasons than any of the four coaches below her on the all-time win list. And I would be remiss if I did not point out that she found a way to win in every incarnation of women’s basketball in the last third of a century. She began her coaching just 2 years after Title IX was signed, only 4 years after the full-court, five player game was officially adopted for women and two years before women played basketball at the Olympics. As she won her 1000th game, her former players are carried on the current rosters of 11 of the 13 teams in the WNBA and sit on coaching benches at every level of girls’ and women’s basketball. Let’s face it, Coach Summitt is modern women’s basketball.

And having written that, I think it’s safe to say that Lisa Leslie is the WNBA. Carla and I knew we wouldn’t have Lisa forever. When we bought the team, she was one of only a handful of remaining inaugural players still active in the League. We knew she would play again after she had Lauren, and then for us it was just a question of how long. After all, she has won every award the WNBA has to offer (and most of them more than once) and even last season, at 36 and coming back after a year away, she was second in the League in blocks, rebounds and double-doubles. If she had asked me, I would have told her I thought she could play for another 3 or 4 (or 10?) seasons. But I am excited that I will have another 34 games to watch her brand of Sparks basketball. Of course, all good things must come to an end and it is only fitting that a player as dominant as Lisa would leave the game at the top. We expect her to do everything to make this as memorable season as possible for all of us.

Ok, I have to finish this because my end of the semester grades are due at school. But I’ll be back in another 2 weeks. We’ll see who’s on our roster then.

January 27, 2009:

I always get in trouble when I wander into the Sparks office. I often go in after school (I teach at High Tech LA, a public charter school in the Valley) and usually do something stupid, like offer suggestions as to what people should be doing. “We should have more blogs on our website,” I recall saying one day. “I think people might be interested in what happens when the players aren’t on the court.” Everyone completely agreed with me. I felt so good about my contribution. And then, it suddenly turned out that what everyone really agreed on was that I should be blogging. So, here we are.

It may seem like the most fun part about owning a team is during the season—sitting courtside, cheering on the team with everyone in the arena, celebrating wins and commiserating about losses. Don’t get me wrong—I love that part. For me, though, the real fun for an owner starts with the opening of the free agency period. This is the “fantasy league” part about being a team owner, except it’s real. You’re really trying to get players to play for you, stay within your salary cap, analyze other teams’ rosters and how they’ll stack up against yours, assess trade offers and anticipate draft order. It’s not just what you might post on Rebkell, but what’s actually going to happen. Of course, I get to rely on one of the winning-est GM’s in the League, who has a great eye for basketball talent, which makes it all that much more fun. (And it means when all of you think we’re idiots and doing the wrong thing, you blame Penny, and not Carla and me, which is fine with us!)

Obviously, we had a great season in 2008, advancing all the way to the Western Conference Finals, but Sparks basketball is about winning championships and no one in the organization is happy unless we end up with a ring. So, we knew we had some work to do in the off-season. We were excited about the quality of the free agents in the marketplace—Tina, Snow, LJ, Ticha, well, you know who all of them are. We were excited about the draft class of ’09, but we had traded our first round pick in order to acquire DeLisha Milton-Jones last season. We knew we had a solid team and didn’t need to make a lot of moves, but you can’t win in this League by sitting still. And then there was that news about Candace. That lit a bit of a fire under us as well! Didn’t I say the off-season was as exciting as the regular season?

Penny started by getting us back in the mix in the first round of the draft by trading our rights to Chamique Holdsclaw to Atlanta for their #13 pick. We made a run at Kara Braxton, but Detroit wasn’t going to let her go. There is still a lot of activity going on with all the teams—there is trade talk everywhere and everyone is still vying for those free agents (though Sacramento made sure Ticha would stay put for another season.) Almost every day, Penny calls me with a new scenario. I read on Rebkell last week that we had signed Tina Thompson to a multi-year deal, which would be great! I better catch up with Penny on that one….

We’re gearing up in a big way to make this a Championship year, so you won’t want to miss any of the action. Our home opener on June 6 coincides with opening day of the League for the first time since the last time we won the Championship, in 2002, so you will want to make sure you’re there to see what my “fantasy league” team looks like.