LOS ANGELES — Kiki Iriafen had one year of college basketball left, and she wanted to spend it at home.
For an entire breakout junior season at Stanford, people wormed their way into her ear, offering sweet whispers she should look to the transfer portal. Iriafen ignored them all, until the Cardinal lost in the Sweet 16, and she was forced to sit and think about her future. Some days, she was set on leaving. Some days, she was set on staying. But her head coach, the legendary Tara VanDerveer, was retiring, and it felt like the natural close to a three-year chapter – one that she hoped would bring her back to her hometown of Los Angeles.
After transferring in mid-April, Iriafen was weighing UCLA and USC. Lindsay Gottlieb, and the Trojans, made a hard push. They felt good.
Then, one day, Iriafen’s phone buzzed. She answered.
It was Dawn Staley. The Dawn Staley.
“I would be lying if I said I’m not like, ‘Ohhhh gosh,’” USC head coach Gottlieb remembered. “Just a conversation with the national, defending national champs.”
On paper, it looked tragic for USC, because it was perfect for Iriafen. Staley had a reputation for developing bigs at South Carolina, the premier program in the country. Kamilla Cardoso, after all, had just been minted as a top-three WNBA Draft choice. And Iriafen’s final choice came down to USC and USC, to Gottlieb and Staley, to back-to-back weekend visits to Southern California and then South Carolina in the late spring.
She never took the second visit.
“Seeing the investment that they’ve done here, even into NIL and to women’s sports – everyone from the A.D. down is all-in on women’s basketball,” Iriafen said of USC. “So, I think it’s a really exciting time to be a women’s basketball player in college, and I think SC was the perfect spot for me.”
It represented another pinnacle of Gottlieb’s accelerated rebuild at USC. They had beaten out the reigning champs, the gold standard of women’s college basketball, to land the best power forward in the nation. And they did it by leveraging the cards unique to them, Gottlieb selling Iriafen on the plan to grow her as a person. The plan to grow every player on the roster as a person, in a modern-day vision much larger than basketball.
In the first meeting with her returning players at USC after a crushing April loss to UConn in the Elite Eight, Gottlieb delivered a succinct message: The bar has been raised. Immediately, Gottlieb emphasized. It’s why, Gottlieb told the Southern California News Group, they had chased Iriafen and Oregon State transfer guard Talia Von Oelhoffen in the portal. It’s why they set about hiring a program general manager, Amy Broadhead, in a boundary-pushing move for women’s college basketball.
Gottlieb wants to win. She wants to win, too, in the NIL space, positioning USC at the forefront of every aspect of college basketball. So does Broadhead. And in their first conversations around that GM role, they discussed a vision for USC as not only a national champion – but as the “best and coolest” women’s basketball brand, as Broadhead put it, in the world.
“If I’m being honest, it’s the women’s version of the Yankees,” Broadhead said, referring to the visibility of the Yankees’ brand in Major League Baseball.
“When you inspire greatness, or inspire this idea that women have the ability to be part of one of the greatest brands in sports,” she continued later, “I think that is something that is unequivocally an amazing opportunity.”
‘I don’t want to be status-quo’
When Gottlieb first arrived at Cal in 2005 as an assistant with Joanne Boyle, the program had little identity.
The Golden Bears had posted a losing record for 12 consecutive seasons. They couldn’t sell a winning tradition, certainly. They couldn’t sell flash. So Gottlieb’s goal, then – and continuing when she took over as Cal’s head coach in 2011 – was to sell her players. To let fans see their individuality.
It was how, as former Golden Bear Layshia Clarendon once told the Southern California News Group, Gottlieb’s program ended up with players with purple-dyed hair. And tattoos. And who showed up to the 2012-13 Final Four banquet in suits and ties and dresses. A “beautiful band of misfits,” as Clarendon described.
Shift forward a decade later, and Gottlieb is similarly dedicated to supporting and centralizing her players’ individuality in a new light in the NIL era.
“I feel like it’s my duty and responsibility, not to tell them that money’s everything … but for female athletes, to have their four college years – or however many years they’re in college – be a time where they can parlay their platform into money,” Gottlieb said. “It’s like, ‘Let’s help them do that in a responsible and smart way.’”
Coming off the program’s best season (29-6) in three decades and importing the best recruiting class in the nation, Gottlieb – for the first time in her three years at USC – wasn’t faced with approaching an offseason rebuild. There weren’t many holes to plug. There was no water to tread. And so a woman who became known as “Coachie” around her alma mater of Brown began to think bigger.
“Now I’m saying, ‘Okay, here we are,’” Gottlieb said. “I don’t want to be, status-quo. I don’t want to be just, think this is good enough. How do we build it?”
She began engaging with companies and brands, in the summer months, more than she ever had at USC. And Gottlieb sold them. Hard. USC women’s basketball, she said, would be the most-televised team in the country. Whatever they believed sophomore wunderkind JuJu Watkins’ value to be, Gottlieb, emphasized, it was higher.
And yet, for all her comfortability in such conversations, Gottlieb still had a basketball team to coach. USC athletic director Jen Cohen, who has prioritized streamlining the athletic department’s NIL efforts since her hire a year ago, told Gottlieb she needed another position on staff. Over time, Gottlieb, Cohen and USC Athletics’ Chief Operating Officer Jason Cappadoro settled on hiring a general manager: a rapidly expanding NIL and recruiting role in college basketball, further popularized by St. Bonaventure men’s basketball’s hiring former ESPN newsbreaker Adrian Wojnarowski as its GM.
“Now, here we are with the best player in the country, with the potential to have a really nationally prominent team for a long time, and to be at the cutting edge of everything that’s going on,” Gottlieb said.
“That’s something I really embraced.”
Building personalized brands
At the end of her time at alma mater Brown, a former captain and standout on the women’s soccer team, Broadhead decided to walk on to the women’s basketball team.
She found a seat on the end of the bench next to Gottlieb, then a player-turned-student-assistant more valued for her mind off the court than her contributions on it.
They bonded, then, through a shared love but a different perspective on the game. From her seat, Gottlieb would analyze an opposing team’s coverages. From hers, Broadhead would analyze an opposing team’s uniforms.
“And sure enough,” Gottlieb chuckled, “I went right into coaching, and she went right into product.”
For decades, Broadhead worked at Reebok, and Adidas, and Nike and New Balance and Puma. Last year, she moved back to L.A., searching for a new path and a return to the heartbeat of women’s basketball. Gottlieb called her a couple of times during USC’s season, consulting her for informal advice on licensing and NIL matters.
When the position at USC went live in the summer, Gottlieb received more than 150 resumes. Broadhead stood out, her old companion on Brown’s bench. And suddenly, a career sports marketing leader without any working experience in a college athletics department is now at the forefront of a new era for USC women’s basketball – and women’s basketball at large.
“I know what a huge responsibility it is, especially being the first of its kind,” Broadhead said. “So I’m just gonna put my best foot forward and utilize the skills I have from my previous experiences, and learn a lot as I go.”
In the offseason, Gottlieb dedicated program funds toward hiring a professional photographer, with the goal to curate personalized portfolios to present to potential NIL partners. Senior center Clarice Akunwafo, an aspiring surgeon who is working toward medical school, posed for her photos in scrubs, for example.
And in Broadhead’s first few weeks at USC, she has been sitting for individualized conversations with each player in the program, attempting to grasp their on-court and off-court personalities for a sense of how to market those portfolios along with their personal brands. Von Oelhoffen, for example, is interested in eventually monetizing her stream-of-consciousness Gen-Z Twitter persona into content creation. Iriafen, who graduated from Stanford with a degree in design engineering, hasn’t found her niche yet, she laughed.
But everything Gottlieb was doing, from organizing the portfolios to hiring Broadhead, was “something I’ve never seen before,” Iriafen emphasized.
“Just her vision for building a dynasty, it’s just really exciting to me,” Von Oelhoffen said of Gottlieb. “I want to be a part of that first national championship.”
“And I know that she’s looking to get a few.”
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