Lindsay Gottlieb is empowering women through basketball

Lindsay Gottlieb is not like most coaches.

Sure, you’ll find her marshaling the sidelines of Galen Center on most weekends. Her dirty blonde hair will be bundled up in a tight ponytail as she calls out assignments and plays. There won’t be a quarter in which Gottlieb isn’t turning to her bench to talk to her coaching staff and players, regardless of how the game is going.

On the court, Gottlieb is intense and demanding.

She is the head coach of the University of Southern California’s women’s basketball team and she strives for success. That’s how she has operated her entire career.

But off of the hardwood, Gottlieb’s responsibilities go far beyond drawing up a successful pick-and-roll.

“My role with this group and with college basketball in general is absolutely to impact the young women I coach in greater ways than just Xs and Os,” Gottlieb said in a recent phone interview with Annenberg Media.

At just 44-years-old, USC is Gottlieb’s seventh different coaching stop.

She is a trailblazer and a serial winner — her accolades include two Big West championships, a Pac-12 conference championship, eight NCAA tournament appearances including a Final Four berth, and a National Coach of the Year nomination — and also a nomad.

Gottlieb has opened doors for the next generation of female coaches, such as when she became the first NCAA women’s head coach to be hired by an NBA team. But this brilliant basketball mind also stems from the unlikeliest of backgrounds.

Gottlieb grew up in Scarsdale, New York — about a 30-minute train ride from New York City. Her grandfather, father, and uncle composed the Gottlieb, Gottlieb and Gottlieb law firm, and dinnertime conversations were often about philosophy or politics.

However, Gottlieb never felt the pressure to follow in her family’s footsteps. Her parents, who “both had a love of sports,” encouraged Gottlieb to forge her own path and try out any sport she wanted.

That path, as it turns out, was basketball.

“I would go into New York City and watch high school games,” she said. “I loved the Knicks, I watched the NBA, I watched boys, I watched girls, I loved it.”

Gottlieb fell in love quickly and became a basketball nerd, as she puts it.

Even now, she reminisces on dissecting lineups and match-ups as a 13-year-old when most of her peers only cared about the flash that comes with the game.

Years passed and Gottlieb was relentless, prioritizing basketball over all other sports. It paid off.

Gottlieb committed to play for Brown University, striking a balance between her love of the game and her family’s Ivy League tradition. But she tore her ACL right before her senior year of high school.

“It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me,” Gottlieb said.

Her knee gave out on a drive to the hoop that she had practiced thousands of times. Gottlieb was devastated. She bawled during her entire MRI scan, but then she picked herself back up.

“Having the game taken away from me, there was no other option than to see it from a coaching perspective,” she said.

After returning from injury, Gottlieb still traded Scarsdale for Providence, Rhode Island to start her college career, but she no longer saw basketball solely as a game of tactics and wins. She thought about college athletics and concluded that the sport she loved had the potential to alter lives.

Gottlieb’s time at Brown was not only a turning point in her basketball trajectory but also in her personal life. Days into her sophomore season, her mother Carol died of cancer.

“She was sort of like a badass female before her time,” Gottlieb said. “It was never something that she said I couldn’t do because I was a girl. There was a real empowerment.”

Gottlieb finished her second year at Brown and then decided to clear her mind by spending a year abroad in Australia. She equates her time overseas to an epiphany that gave her the direction she needed.

Gottlieb returned to Brown for her senior season and also served as her team’s student assistant coach. One day after graduating, she received and accepted an assistant coach job offer from Syracuse’s women’s basketball team.

New Hampshire was next after a brief return to her home state, but Gottlieb considers her pitstop in Richmond as her big break. Joanne Boyle, whose coaching career spanned 25 years, hired Gottlieb as her top assistant when she was only 24-years-old.

“Women empowering women I think is really important and [Boyle], as the boss, kind of let me have room to grow,” Gottlieb said of her mentor.

Six years later, Gottlieb landed her first head coach job at UC Santa Barbara and became the first Gauchos coach to win 20 games in her first season.

An eight-season stint at Cal, where she had previously been an assistant and associate head coach, followed. All the while, she was under the learning tree of athletic director Sandy Barbour.

“[She] was one of the handful of female athletic directors and just watching her lead a major Power Five program the way she did was inspirational to me and influential on my career,” Gottlieb said.

In 2019, the Cleveland Cavaliers came knocking and Gottlieb became the first collegiate women’s head coach to be hired by an NBA team. Her stay in Cleveland lasted three years, less than expected, but she hopes that she was able to inspire others by doing her job the best way she knew how.

Gottlieb had some apprehensions about what leaving the NBA meant.

“When you’re a one of something, I felt like potentially I was letting people down,” she said.

But her change of scenery was for what she called the opportunity of a lifetime to take charge of the USC women’s basketball program.

The Trojans’ season, Gottlieb’s first at USC, ended on March 2 after a hard-fought defeat to UCLA in the first round of the Pac-12 Tournament. After the loss, Gottlieb insisted that this was just the start for her team.

The season is over, but Gottlieb’s work continues.

“I hope that through the basketball culture that we’re creating — the desire for excellence at the highest level — and doing it with integrity, creates powerful and empowered young women,” she said.