As a former high school history teacher, Darrin McBroom is more than comfortable sharing knowledge. And as a college volleyball coach, that’s something he does a lot of. Not just with his players; after all, that’s his job as Drake’s coach. But it’s the general public he wants to get on board with his sport, to bring along sports fans who are new to volleyball or long-ago players who need a refresher.

That was the impetus behind Volleyball 101 this week, hosted by McBroom and the Drake volleyball team and staff. It’s the fourth year Drake has hosted the event. McBroom and his players talked fans through what it is they do, offered some background on themselves and their program, and even ran through drills with some of the people in attendance.

“We’re trying to figure out a way to build a fan base, to tap in to people who love Drake but are just waiting for basketball season to begin,” McBroom said. “Once they see volleyball and get it, they like it. But it’s like anything, if you don’t know it you don’t pay much attention.”

At Iowa, Coach Jim Barnes expressed the same sentiment at Big Ten Media Day.

“We came [to Iowa] to make people talk about volleyball,” he said of himself and his players. “To watch the Iowa Hawkeye fans start going, ‘We’ve got a volleyball team?’ They start getting into volleyball and building that base. We have an incredible fan base. They’ve just been for other sports.”

Volleyball as a whole is in a sort of 101 moment. Its ascent has been somewhat rapid in the past decade, giving some fans a new sport to get behind or reintroducing it to those who played it when it looked very different.

“We have such a good basketball fan base, a lot of people then come out to watch us and they don’t know what they’re watching,” McBroom said.

McBroom and his team helped with that at Volleyball 101. Players demonstrated the different kinds of serves, they showed how setters work on accuracy by setting the ball into a net – and even gave some fans at the event a chance to try. The coach narrated a scrimmage, describing what was happening and why.

One reason for some unfamiliarity with the sport is that the rules have changed over time. While every sport makes some changes with every new season, the changes in volleyball haven’t so much been tweaks but a complete overhaul over time.

Say the words “side out” to a current player and it would make as much sense as telling them about a rotary phone. For generations, a team had to serve to score (earn a side out) and only play to 15 points to win. That changed in 2001 to rally scoring – a point on every serve. At that point college teams played to 30 points, and then it changed to 25. But if it goes to five sets (which used to be called games), the final one is played only to 15.

“Basketball has a clock, football has a clock, even soccer has a clock with weird stoppage time,” McBroom said. “Volleyball has no clock, but they’re trying to fit it into a 2-hour window for television. That’s the reason for a lot of the stuff in recent years.”

The addition of a new position in 2001 can also stump new fans. The libero – the one in the different-colored shirt – was added to bring even more defense into the game, to extend rallies and create excitement. The defensive specialist, who only plays in the back row, also meant short players could have more of role on a volleyball team beyond the big-swinging tall players. The different jersey is to help officials, as the libero has different rules for substitutions.

The pronunciation? Whatever.

McBroom says le-BEHR-oh. Others say LEE-ber-oh. Some get even nuttier.

“Then other people will say this is my ‘lib’ or this is my ‘bro,’” he said.

All those tweaks have helped create a sport with a surge in popularity. In Iowa, volleyball is the top girls’ sport in terms of participation with more than 11,000 players, according to the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union, and it’s the top girls’ team sport nationally with 492,799 playing the sport, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.

“Volleyball is just gaining ground at the grassroots,” McBroom said. “It’s unreal to me now how good kids are getting at a young age. We had a youth team in Des Moines, 12 and under, that just won a national championship. They’re doing things that 12-year-olds weren’t doing at all 10 years ago. They’re hitting jump serves and you think, ‘What?’”

But to some generations, volleyball is still an unknown. A question posed to the entire Drake team during the Volleyball 101 event about if they have to explain their game to people was answered with unanimous nodding.

“My grandparents were here and I was explaining a lot,” said Drake junior Bliss Beck. “They don’t know a lot about it. My mom and dad didn’t grow up with volleyball.”

To be sure, there are volleyball schools. Nebraska, with its 25 years of home sellouts, is certainly one. So is Wisconsin, though there is a little wiggle room there with the school’s nine NCAA hockey titles. Pitt’s women’s basketball team has been to the NCAA tournament just four times in its history but the volleyball team has been in the Final Four each of the past five seasons. In Iowa, Northern Iowa has had volleyball in the spotlight for decades, well before the school’s basketball program started to win.

In fact it’s that UNI juggernaut that has been Drake’s biggest hurdle. The Panthers are the perennial Missouri Valley Conference favorites, and Drake has finished second in the conference five of the past six years. As a mid-major conference, the MVC primarily gets just one NCAA bid, so Drake’s first in school history remains elusive. (Drake went 30-8 in 2022 but didn’t make the NCAA tournament.) Conversely, Northern Iowa hasn’t lost an MVC regular-season match since Drake beat them in November 2022.

What all volleyball teams have in common right now – colleges and high schools – is trying to grab the spotlight before football begins. Thursday night (Aug. 27) in West Des Moines, four of the top teams in the state (West Des Moines Valley, Waukee, Waukee Northwest and Ankeny Centennial) played outdoor matches at Valley Stadium. And Nebraska, Penn State, SMU and Florida were part of the inaugural Spikes Under the Lights at AT&T Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys. The event was nationally televised and had a $1 million purse for the participating teams. The previous weekend, some of the top teams in the country – Texas, Wisconsin, Louisville, Pitt, Kentucky and defending NCAA champion Texas A&M – played in the AVCA First Serve event in Milwaukee.

And even with football up and running soon, volleyball will still grab its share of the limelight. Matches this season are planned on most major networks – Fox, ABC, ESPN, TNT, TBS and HBO. It’s a stage the women get all to themselves, for a little while anyway.

“What I love about volleyball is that softball lives in the shadow of baseball and women’s basketball lives in the shadow of men’s basketball,” McBroom said. “Women’s volleyball is the dominant version of the game. Yes, there’s men’s volleyball but it’s not as popular. But the women’s side is considered the superior version of it.”

Around Iowa this season

Drake: The Bulldogs were picked second in the Missouri Valley Conference despite a team of 10 new players – five freshmen and five transfers joining nine other players. The team got to coalesce early with a summer tour of Spain and Portugal. The Bulldogs host a tournament this weekend (Aug. 28-29) at the Knapp Center that also includes DePaul, Wisconsin-Milwaukee and South Dakota.

Iowa: It’s been a long rebuilding process for the Hawkeyes, and their record of 15-17, 6-14 in the Big Ten was a marked improvement over 4-16, 0-20 two seasons ago. Still, moving up in the powerful Big Ten is one of the biggest challenges a team could face in college volleyball. The Hawkeyes are on the road until hosting the Hawkeye Invitational at Xtream Arena on Sept. 10. Before that, it’s the Cy-Hawk matchup against Iowa State on Sept. 8.

Iowa State: The Cyclones, picked to finish sixth in the Big 12, return 11 players from the team that lost to Minnesota in the second round of the NCAA tournament last season. They’ll be led by all-Big 12 player Rachel Van Gorp, a libero who was the first Cyclone named to the AVCA Player of the Year watchlist for the coming season. They host Loyola, Georgia Tech and Northern Iowa in a tournament this weekend (Aug. 28-30) at Hilton Coliseum, with Sunday’s match against UNI providing a strong in-state battle early on in the season.

Northern Iowa: The Panthers return all starters from last season’s team that took its lumps in the non-conference with a rugged schedule and then breezed unscathed through MVC play. The Panthers are in search of a fifth consecutive conference title. Four players were named preseason all-MVC: middle blocker Maryn Bixby, outside hitters Lily Dykstra and Cassidy Hartman and defensive specialist/libero Jadyn Petersen. Bixby and Petersen were high school teammates at Dike-New Hartford.

Northwestern College: The Red Raiders return all starters from a team that finished as national runner-up last season. They’re the preseason No. 1 for the first time in school history and despite being an NAIA power, they are still in search of their elusive first national title. Among the returning players is Stella Winterfeld, a first-team all-American who played at Western Christian.

Share

Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”

Buy Me a Coffee

There have been a lot of Iowa connections to celebrate with the WNBA in recent years (you know, when the conversation about the WNBA is actually about basketball). Even beyond Caitlin Clark, former Iowa State player Bridget Carleton and former Iowa player Megan Gustafson have won championships and now are thriving with the expansion Portland Fire.

But the WNBA is celebrating something else — its 30^th season. And a recent social media post made it clear those local connections have been there all along. Last week, the Phoenix Mercury welcomed back its first team and it indeed was a team of superstars with legends like Cheryl Miller and Nancy Lieberman.

Also on the team, though, were two former Hawkeyes and former teammates on Iowa’s 1993 Final Four team: Toni Foster and Tia Jackson. I covered them in college and wrote about the launch of the WNBA and even I didn’t remember that they were both on the same team on opening day. (Is this where I turn in my sports writer credential?) That’s how much they, and the early days of the WNBA, have fallen off the radar.

Not that I’d ever forget the players. Foster was a first-team all-American on that Final Four team. She didn’t have monster numbers because she did a little bit of everything in the post: score, rebound, block, play solid defense. She was a quiet leader who just got things done.

That historic season in Phoenix, though, was to be her only one in the W. She was picked up by Seattle in the next season’s expansion draft but didn’t make the roster. Basketball’s loss was Chicago’s gain – Foster returned to her home city to become a fifth-grade teacher for six years until switching gears and becoming a Chicago police officer in 2006. She has since become a detective.

Teammate Jackson also only played a year in Phoenix. A year behind Foster, she emerged as one of the stars of her much-lauded Iowa recruiting class but a knee injury delayed what would have been her senior season. Injuries then plagued her WNBA career, which ended after a season. She’s been coaching ever since and is now associate head coach at Duke.

Also on a WNBA opening day roster was one of Iowa’s most decorated players ever — Michelle Edwards. The national player of the year in 1988, after an Elite Eight season in which Iowa was ranked No. 1, returned from playing internationally to join the Cleveland Rockers (still the best-ever WNBA team name) at age 31. She played with them for four seasons until moving to Seattle for her final pro season. She got into college coaching after that, including a long stint under her former coach C. Vivian Stringer at Rutgers. She now works for Nike. Edwards was the real deal; she was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 2014. Earlier this summer, her home city of Boston named a basketball court after her.

The past is always part of the present, even when we don’t actually remember it. This month’s 6-on-6 stories, a collection that comes on the 6th of every month, have ways of connecting the past and the present. Look out: There are a lot of people out there writing the future now.

Pancake’s Mom Has Got It Going On: Why Portland Fell in Love with Megan Gustafson

Oregon Public Broadcasting: Since she was the national player of the year at Iowa in 2019, Megan Gustafson has bounced around like an overinflated basketball. Five WNBA teams. Pro teams in Greece, England and Turkey. A member of the Spanish National Team. In all of that, though, Gustafson (now DiLeo, but we’ll get to that in a second) and her little dog Pancake seem to have found a basketball home in the Pacific Northwest. “This should be a household name,” said University of Oregon Professor Courtney M. Cox, who has researched and written about gender and global basketball. “Megan should be someone everyone knows.” That may be coming soon. Gustafson is starting in Portland, which signed her to a two-year contract that pays about $500,000 annually. And when she married David DiLeo on July 18, with her former coach Lisa Bluder officiating, it was covered by People magazine. Because the present always connects to the past, David DiLeo is the son of former Drake women’s basketball player Kay (Riek) DiLeo and Frank DiLeo, who was on Tom Davis’ Iowa staff. David DiLeo is also a pro basketball player, playing most recently in Turkey.

Everything You Need to Know About the Tour de France Femmes 2026

Red Bull: Officially, this is the fifth “Tour de France Femmes” but like so many things with women’s sports, this is the latest iteration of something that has had starts and stops for a long time. In this case, for 70 years. On Saturday, Aug. 1, the women’s edition of the legendary race got underway and for those who either can’t get enough of cycling or missed the men’s one, it’s a chance to watch that gorgeous scenery and meet the emerging women’s stars. There are marked differences between the men’s event and the women’s: length (9 stages not 21), distance (1,175 km not 3,245) and, shockingly, prize money (250,000 euros prize money pool overall, 50,000 euros to the winner not 2.3 million euros overall and 500,000 euros for the men’s winner). But those differences could make it immensely appealing to watch, particularly the final stage on Sunday, Aug. 9. Instead of coasting through Paris with the race already decided like the men do, the women’s final stage involves a circuit that begins with a mountain ascent and back down into the city of Nice and up back again, four times in all, making the descending finish a sprint to the end. Could get a little crazy. Could be awesome. The Tour de France Femmes is streaming on Peacock in the U.S.

What They’re Saying After the Ruling to Allow 8th-Graders to Compete in Iowa High School Sports

Cedar Rapids Gazette: As of Aug. 1, eighth-graders are eligible to compete in Iowa high school sports. Who wanted that to happen? As it turns out, not any coaches or administrators in Iowa, reports Jeff Linder in the Cedar Rapids Gazette. It’s been OK for eighth-graders to play varsity baseball and softball in the summer before their freshman year, but the Iowa legislature got a notion to extend that to all sports and passed a new rule making it so. “The schools didn’t ask for this, and we didn’t promote it,” said Tom Keating, executive director of the Iowa High School Athletic Association. The impetus behind the change is that high school sports participation is down, and this could provide a boost. But it’s possible the legislature forgot one little detail: “It might help participation numbers of the high schools, but it’s taking away participation from middle schools. It’s like a merry-go-round,” said Tonya Moe, assistant director of the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union.

Women’s Professional Baseball League Makes a Rainy Debut in Front of Enthusiastic Crowd

Associated Press: For most people, women’s baseball means a certain movie that takes place in the World War II era. And as enduring as “A League of Their Own” has been since it hit the big screen in 1992, there have been attempts to make women’s baseball more than a movie memory. A few short-lived leagues have come and gone since the iconic All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, but hopes are high that the Women’s Professional Baseball League will have some staying power. The four-team league debuted last weekend with a first season that is being played entirely in Springfield, Ill. This AP story sets the scene, but is far from the only record of it. The Athletic also set up the opening weekend, the women’s sports site The IX has had thorough coverage and Sarah Spain chatted with players on her “Good Game With Sarah Spain” podcast. But my favorite detail? The meeting of the mascot and her real-life inspiration — 99-year-old AAGPBL veteran Maybelle Blair, who threw out the first pitch for the new league’s opener. Even Hollywood could never have imagined a real-life scene like that.

A Heart for the Game: Hutchison Honored for Impactful Coaching Career

Illinois State Magazine: Jill Hutchison is someone many longtime Drake women’s basketball fans would be familiar with. She coached all-Americans and NCAA-caliber teams at Illinois State, with success dating back to the first AIAW national tournament in 1972. Later, she was part of the Missouri Valley Conference women’s basketball broadcasts. And, not incidentally, she is one of the nicest people on the planet. But something else Hutchison did has flown under the radar and has echoed through the decades for players well beyond the MVC: She helped debunk the myth that women were physically incapable of playing full-court basketball. Hutchison’s graduate research involved putting female athletes through their paces in a five-player basketball game and testing their vital signs afterward. She presented her findings to girls’ and women’s sports officials, and for the 1969-70 season the official women’s basketball rules changed from six-player to five-player for colleges and most high schools. This summer, her career was revisited when Illinois State honored Hutchison with the university’s Distinguished Alumni Award. It was much deserved. “I always felt that basketball was a tool to teach life lessons, and those life lessons are all surrounded by relationships,” Hutchison said. “That’s what it’s really all about.”

First Girls’ Polo Team Breaks With Tradition, but Keeps the Goat Carcass

New York Times: Generations of girls and women have worked to prove that they can compete on any playing field — launching a logo 3 on a basketball court, taking down an opponent on a wrestling mat or racing on the streets of Boston in a marathon. Now there’s a new one: riding horseback to grab and carry a headless dead goat on a muddy field in Kyrgyzstan. The game is kok-boru. It’s like polo except there are no mallets, with a little rugby roughness thrown in, and players use their hands to procure the goat and drop it onto a scoring target. (If you must watch, this Instagram clip or Facebook video offer a peek.) The game has been played exclusively by men for hundreds of years, but that’s changing; last year, six teenage girls formed their country’s first women’s kok-boru team. Begimai Bakirova, the player featured in the story, was encourage by her father to play. Mom? Not so much. “It’s a disease,” she said. Another mom was more enthusiastic. “She’s barely on her phone,” she said of her daughter. Ah, the universal power of sport.

Share

Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”

Buy Me a Coffee

I’m happy to join fellow Iowa writers and journalists as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. The collaborative is more than 70 writers throughout the state - likely some familiar names to longtime Iowa readers — publishing on topics ranging from politics to food to sports and so much more. With a subscription to the IWC newsletter, readers get two weekly compilations of stories: a news roundup on Sundays, and The Flipside, a feature-filled newsletter that arrives on Wednesdays.

Meet the writers here, and see for yourself the great variety the collaborative offers.

Share

Sometimes the whole history of something is right before your eyes and you might not even notice it.

I had a day like that earlier this year when I was sitting in the bleachers for a Granny Basketball League game. (Why was I there? You’ll find out further below.) It wasn’t the vintage style of girls’/women’s basketball that was being played that struck me as so remarkable. And it wasn’t the vintage-style uniforms.

It was the location.

Basketball, with early rules designed to protect genteel delicate womenfolk and their lady parts, was being played in the same grade school gym where Caitlin Clark began a journey that transformed her into a firebrand (and brand) playing anything but delicate basketball – as the last month or so has proved so obviously and obnoxiously.

But as older women returned to a version of the firebrands they might have been as young and probably not delicate girls by gently duking it out in West Des Moines’ St. Francis of Assisi gym, the circle of it all was amazing to ponder.

This month’s 6-on-6 collection of six notable women’s sports stories gives us a few other firebrands, too. Fortunately, our world is full of them.

These American Women Are Making History as Referees at the Men’s World Cup

Washington Post: It’s hard enough to be an official in any sport. In short, everybody hates you. And any woman who has deigned to step into a man’s world knows they don’t exactly roll out welcome mats for you. So a smattering of women stepping onto the pitch at the men’s World Cup is a pretty big deal. The history here is that it was an all-women crew of Americans in a group-stage match between Czech Republic and South Africa early in the tournament. The barrier was first broken in Qatar in 2022 when three women from France, Brazil and Mexico joined the officiating ranks. And if people aren’t really noticing what or how they’re doing, they’re probably doing their jobs quite well.

Subscribe now

Chris and Martina: The Final Set

Netflix and Fresh Air: I hate this. I hate this so much. I hate this with every fiber of my being. Oh, it’s a great documentary; I hate that the story is what it is. Because what I truly believe to be the greatest rivalry in the history of sports (take that, Yankees-Red Sox and Lakers-Celtics) is an amazing story in and of itself. But in a cruel irony, tennis legends Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova share more than a friendship born of rivalry; they share cancer diagnoses and treatments. This film gets into their rivalry on the court, but it’s their medical fates that hit you in the gut. They even reference a classic “Saturday Night Live” sketch in which the retired versions of themselves continue to compete against each other in mundane careers like real estate or vegetable farming (and sadly is nowhere to be found on YouTube). Now they don’t compete; they’re teammates. They played each other 80 times in their careers, 60 of them in finals. In this, their final set, hopefully both can pull off a victory. (Just before the documentary aired, Evert announced her cancer had returned a third time.)

How U.S. Twins Hana and Amanda Moll Are Redefining Pole Vault Rivalry with a Dream of Sharing Olympic Gold

Olympics.com: While much of the sister talk lately was a reunion of Venus and Serena Williams for a doubles match at Wimbledon that never happened, there’s a better sister act brewing in U.S. sports. At the NCAA outdoor track and field championships in June, twins Hana and Amanda Moll, competing for the University of Washington, finished 1-2 in the pole vault. Amanda did so by setting a national collegiate record of 4.92 meters (approximately 16 feet 1 inch) – breaking Hana’s record of 4.84 (15-9) in the process. “I want to be on top, but if I don’t have it on the day, as long as she’s the one who’s ahead of me, I’m very happy,” Hana said. The 21-year-olds have their sights set on the LA28 Olympics. Last year in Tokyo, they competed for the first time in the world championships. They finished tied for sixth.

Still Got Game: Hurry – Don’t Run – to the Granny Basketball National Tournament in Ankeny

dsm Magazine: It started as a lark, a way for some older women to get some exercise and maybe raise a little money. Then it went national. Six-on-six basketball might be long gone from Iowa high schools, but you’ll see it wherever women aged 50 or older decide to organize a team and find a gym to play in. This version uses 1920s-eras rules and the players wear, yes, bloomers. Begun in 2006 in Lansing, Iowa, the official Granny Basketball League was founded as a nonprofit in 2008 and now includes 57 teams in 11 states and one in Canada, with more than 800 players and volunteers. The 18^th national tournament will be July 17-19 in Ankeny. Genteel? Hardly. “Even though you’re playing for fun and you love your opponent, you really gotta give me that ball,” one Granny said. (Note: I wrote this story for dsm Magazine as part of my day job working for Business Publications Corp.)

What the WNBA Won’t Tell You with Emma Carmichael

Rough Notes: The WNBA seems to be having a good enough time celebrating its 30th season (but 29th year; these things can be confusing). It’s definitely worth celebrating, but this somewhat wandering piece points out just what the world was in 1996 and it happened to include another women’s basketball league: the American Basketball League (ABL). Most of the legendary 1996 Olympic gold medal-winning team, including current coaching royalty Dawn Staley, opted for the ABL and not the WNBA. It had a better salary structure and it played, as I once heard Staley say in an interview, during “basketball season.” Not the summer. Alas, it did not survive. Carmichael is working on an oral history of the WNBA, but discusses that “other” league and how its legacy helped shaped the W despite not surviving. (The 1990s are such an under-acknowledged part of the women’s basketball story but that that is a topic for another day.) A warning: There’s great content in this post but it might challenge your eyeballs a bit with its presentation.

Why Flavor Flav Is Betting Big on Women’s Sports with ‘SHE Weekend’ in Las Vegas

Forbes: Flavor Flav might not fit the traditional image of a sports investor, writer Doug Melville says, but perhaps that's exactly the point. The Rock N Roll Hall of Fame inductee as a member of legendary rappers Public Enemy has been women’s sports’ biggest hype man in recent years. (He even spread the word to help get UNI swimmer Olivia Chambers’ family to Paris for the 2024 Paralympics where she won a gold and two silvers.) It started in 2024 when Flav learned of the financial hardships of the U.S. women’s water polo team, then he moved on to being head cheerleader for many teams and athletes in a variety of sports in Paris and beyond. The support will culminate with hosting SHE Weekend July 16-19 in Las Vegas. SHE Weekend was born of Flav’s irritation of the love from the powers that be for the U.S. men’s hockey team’s gold medal in Milan Cortina but not the women’s. So he decided to throw them a party of their own, which turned into a celebration of myriad female athletes and teams. “There ain't nothing wrong with a little helping hand," he says.

Share

Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”

Buy Me a Coffee

I’m happy to join fellow Iowa writers and journalists as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. The collaborative is more than 70 writers throughout the state - likely some familiar names to longtime Iowa readers - publishing on topics ranging from politics to food to sports and so much more. With a subscription to the IWC newsletter, readers get two weekly compilations of stories: a news roundup on Sundays, and The Flipside, a feature-filled newsletter that arrives on Wednesdays.

Meet the writers here, and see for yourself the great variety the collaborative offers.

Share

Several years ago, I spent New Year’s Day channel-hopping between college football bowl games and a PBS marathon of Sister Wendy, the art-loving nun. My joke at the time was that it was the perfect representation of the cultural battle within my soul: sports vs. the arts.

Then a few years ago, I discovered I had some company. Even more fun than a British nun talking me through the great museums of the world was a guy on Twitter twinning amazing sports photographs with great works of art. It was like I found my new virtual BFF and they weren’t even named Siri or Alexa.

I’m not alone in finding utter joy from that. LJ Rader has been running social media accounts called Art But Make It Sports since 2019, accruing more than a million followers, and in March released a book featuring some of his most popular pairings, newly created connections with iconic sports photos as well as insight into his process. The entire Art But Make It Sports endeavor began on a lark but turned out to be a single-circled Venn diagram for a certain kind of geek as well as an introduction to the beauty of art and sports photography, not to mention the artistry of sports itself.

Rader isn’t an artist or art historian or even a teacher. His professional life is in sports and data; art is a passion. He recently left his day job running the broadcast group at Sportradar, a sports technology company that is the official data partner of the WNBA, Major League Baseball and other leagues. He had also worked at DraftKings and NBC Sports, where he won an Emmy Award for his work at the 2014 Winter Olympics.

He’s now launching a new sports data company, FanFlare Sports, specializing in women’s volleyball. He also has a Substack, ArtButMakeItSports, that dives a little deeper into his creations and his process.

Rader grew up in Westchester, N.Y., and is a New Yorker, a sports fan who has gotten to enjoy recent championships by the NBA’s Knicks and the WNBA’s Liberty.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Your interest in women’s sports has been clear in this account from the beginning, and I remember we once talked about you being a Liberty fan. This isn’t new, you’ve been there all along.

My professional life is now very much tethered to women’s sports. And the account. I’ll watch anything that is competitive and interesting. And W games are probably more interesting in the regular season than NBA games because they matter more, they’re a little more aggressive – because I think they matter more. One thing about the account is I don’t think I’ve ever gotten the comment, ‘Why are you posting women’s sports?’ People are at my mercy now so hopefully I’m bringing them up to my standard that sports are sports and it doesn’t matter who is playing them.

Subscribe now

Did you get a bit of a boost during Caitlin Clark’s senior year? I remember when she hit that buzzer-beater against Michigan State, you did a post that blew up and wrote a follow-up story about the photo of that moment [by Brian Ray of the Iowa Athletics staff]. Was the interest in that post another push for the account?

It goes up and down, depending on the viral posts. Of the viral posts, I’d say Caitlin Clark – whether it was that buzzer-beater or just her moments with Angel Reese – just tends to have the most interesting content. She’s probably the most featured athlete on the account at this point. So whenever anything about her gets posted, it gets a lot of attention and a lot more followers come through. I just like the nature of her game; it lends itself really well to artistic depiction. All the storylines she has, off the court and on, it’s fun and easier and lends itself to being more viral when you can post something more people are talking about. And everyone is always talking about her. [Rader dedicated an entire Substack post to his favorite images and posts about Clark after Iowa’s 2023-24 season.]

Can we go back to the beginning? What was the light bulb moment when you started putting these things together?

I wouldn’t say there was a light bulb moment in starting the account; it’s sort of something I’ve always done. I started by captioning artwork, giving it sports-themed captions and I did that on my personal Instagram account. It was mostly shits and giggles for my friends, I didn’t think anything otherwise. Then I had people telling me, ‘It should be its own account!’ So I did that, and three months later COVID hit and I thought this would be a good thing to do in quarantine.

Then I started realizing I was captioning things I could just put next to the artwork with the image. Instead of saying ‘Caitlin Clark screaming looks like this Francis Bacon’ and captioning Caitlin Clark screaming, why don’t I just take the image of Caitlin Clark screaming and the art and put them side by side?’ [Bacon’s famous screaming image, ‘Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X’ is an iconic work at the Des Moines Art Center.] It became more of a celebration of sports imagery and photography. That’s when it started becoming even more fun.

If you scroll back and look at the very early posts, some of them are great, some of them are stupid, I didn’t have the highest editorial bar. But it kind of evolved. If there was any light bulb moment for the account, it was when I started putting the images next to each other.

You’ve been speaking at museums as part of your book tour. What kinds of questions are coming from those discussions?

It’s a range of people who have been coming to the events. A lot of people know what the account is, but a lot of folks are members of the museum and just go to any programming they have and it’s fun to hear the questions they have. Somebody asked, ‘Have you ever used LeRoy Nieman?’ which led to an interesting discussion about if that would be cheating. I kind of think it would be, so I toed the line and said I’d probably use Ernie Barnes because it’s a little more artistic depiction of athletes.

What is your process? How do you store the images and put them together?

I’ve always photographed art at museums and galleries. Pretty early on in the process I made a specific folder for them on my phone and any time I go to a museum I photograph it and add it. I only take pictures of the artwork. I use Google Lens instead of taking a photo of the nameplate, that saves storage and time and when I go to do a post, I can just find the image.

I have all these images in my phone, something happens, I think about all those images I have memorized. I memorize the images themselves but a lot of time I know where I took them and I have a folder for every museum and that’s helpful. Sometimes it’s frustrating when I have the image in my head but I don’t remember where I took it.

Sometimes I see something and think it resembles a certain artist’s style, and that’s actually more fun. I kind of taught myself art history and if I can leverage that … the memory, the pattern recognition stuff is cool but I don’t think of it as impressive. It’s just always there.

Can you turn it off? Are you always looking?

I’m always looking. Even before I had the account, I was always seeing things through a sports lens. I love making connections, so it probably comes as no surprise that I like puns. It’s the same sort of language, just verbal instead of image-based. Same concept of what I want to do with my work.

Where did you get your interest and how did you build that knowledge?

My grandparents. They randomly had a garage in the West Village back in the day. A lot of their patrons were artists and they could never pay, so they’d always barter with art. So they randomly had an impressive art collection even though they’re just normal people. I’d go to their house and see art, and being not too far from New York City, lots of museums all around, I kind of grew up around art. I took a class in college, kind of a 101 class. I told my parents I wanted to minor in it and they said, ‘Do you want to work in it?’ I said no, and they said, ‘Teach yourself.’ I read a ton of books, Wikipedia wormholes, tons of museums. I could never teach it, I never claimed to be an art historian. It’s just a fun knowledge base.

What are you looking for? Is it the art that comes into your head first or the photo? Or are you watching a game and think, ‘Oh, there’s got to be a photo somewhere about that play I just saw’?

I guess the first one. The first piece is the art because that’s what I have mentally banked. That’s the reference point I’m working off. Then when an event happens, I see that image and then I figure out what I want. Is it a screen shot? Is it a photograph? Photographers are constantly sending me images so it’s sourcing through what the right image is to work with. But the very first step is the mental banking of the art.

What are among your most viral posts?

One I had like [six] days ago by far has become become the most popular post. The woman stealing the garbage can at the Knicks parade [currently at 14.6 million views and 12,000 shares on X]. I thought it was just a throwaway post but everyone seems to be united in ‘What is this lady doing?’

How did you choose which photos and posts to include in the book?

With the day to day of the account, I’m only posting things that are in the moment. If I went back and did Brandi Chastain or Willie Mays, people would wonder, ‘Why are you doing this?’ I could do historical images, but it’s more fun to work in the moment and try to figure out what those things can be.

So part of it with the book was getting a chance to reference things that had never come up before. And I tried to do what I guess you’d call the GOATs, the greatest athletes and the greatest images.

How do you juggle your time with this, work and a toddler?

Sometimes it’s all a big mush. It always has been and always should be a hobby. One I just happen to share with a million-plus people.

Are there particular favorites you’ve had? Things you’re particularly proud you were able to put together?

It’s a cop-out to say, but the next one. It’s literally a drug. Which is funny because people accuse me of using AI – it happens every day. But the biggest reason I do the account is it’s fun for me to come up with the stuff. It’s the same dopamine hit you get … it’s a high, right? If I used AI to do it, I wouldn’t get that hit. There would be no point. Why would I do that?

So I’m always creating, I’m always trying to get that fix with the next pairing.

Links:

“Art But Make It Sports,” the book

Art But Make It Sports on X

Art But Make It Sports on Bluesky

Art But Make It Sports on Instagram

ArtButMakeItSports on Substack

Share

Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”

Buy Me a Coffee

I’m happy to join fellow Iowa writers and journalists as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. The collaborative is more than 70 writers throughout the state - likely some familiar names to longtime Iowa readers - publishing on topics ranging from politics to food to sports and so much more. With a subscription to the IWC newsletter, readers get two weekly compilations of stories: a news roundup on Sundays, and The Flipside, a feature-filled newsletter that arrives on Wednesdays.

Meet the writers here, and see for yourself the great variety the collaborative offers.

Share

My hometown, Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, refers to itself as the Troll Capital of the World. It’s been that way for decades, since a new four-lane highway bypassed the town and mercifully kept the semis and motorcycles from shaking my family home on a regular basis. Not long after that, a local artist revved up a chainsaw and turned a downed tree into a troll. You know, those cute/ugly things with big noses and maybe frizzy hair or nasty teeth. The town has a Scandinavian heritage and when the bypass happened, town leaders leaned into that, started referring to Main Street as the “Trollway” and a town that was always a nice place to visit now had a hook.

More carved trolls followed and if you visit the town, you’ll see that they’re pretty cool and display some amazing artistry. You can get a map and check them all out, as well as have a beer at the Grumpy Troll or get some candy at the Sugar Troll. (So far no one has thought to open a bakery called Trollhouse Cookies.)

If that seemed weird in, say, the 1980s, imagine it now in the internet world. Trolls are a part of so many people’s lives, but not in a good way and, for the most part, not even on purpose. Online trolls, the ones who poison digital discourse, can be anything from annoying to horrifying to downright dangerous.

Part of me hates to give internet trolls any attention, but they are a key part of the discourse of women’s sports in Iowa and that’s at heart of this the first of the 6-on-6 stories to highlight this month. It’s a topic I’ve mentioned before because it just ... well ... is. We’ll leave it at that because it’s just so infuriating. Stick with me though, I promise the things that follow will make you happy.

Online Trolls Harassed Her Six-Year-Old. That Was Only the Beginning

Rolling Stone: There are two kinds of people in this world, as we well know: Those who look at the photo of a grinning little girl who shares a similar build as Audi Crooks talking to her idol and see absolute beauty, and those who see it and mock a child. What we likely don’t know is what happens after that. Lyz Lenz, the superb Cedar Rapids-based writer, takes the story from there. Horrible comments followed. The little girl saw them. Her mom went down a rabbit hole to see who would do that. Seems about right, right? But the story continues. Mom reached out to Mike Draper, owner of Raygun and no stranger to battling trolls. Draper took on the trolls that went after the little girl, too. Lenz’s labyrinthine tale gets into how they found the University of Iowa business student behind the comments, attempts to get an apology, dangling a $1,000 check, a writer whose face was unknowingly used for all of this, lawyers and, ultimately, frustration and sadness. It’s a journey. And if that’s not enough, the little girl’s mom spelled it out even further on her blog. It’s a lot. And a lot for a family, particularly a 6-year-old, to have to endure.

Jordy Frahm’s Epic Nebraska Softball Season Even More Impressive With Pregnancy News

The Oklahoman: She was the national player of the year in softball. A phenomenal hitter. A spectacular pitcher. And, as it turns out, a mother-to-be. Moms in sports are becoming less of a rarity (Serena Williams, many top soccer players – the real “soccer moms”) but a college athlete, the best in her sport, going through most of her historic season while pregnant? (She’s due in December.) That is one mother of a story. Writer Jenni Carlson puts Nebraska superstar Jordy Frahm’s situation into perspective with other pregnant athletes, and also adds a little insight from her own life. But she does sum it up pretty well with one line: “What a badass.” True, and also a big hat’s off to her teammates. The Huskers, in the midst of a historic season, did something even more amazing: They kept Frahm’s secret until she announced it at season’s end. Teamwork, indeed.

The Extraordinary Story of Maja Chwalińska

World Tennis: I always get up early enough on Saturdays to watch the women’s final at the French Open or Wimbledon. Today (Saturday) I thought maybe I’d be a slug because pretty much every big name had been bounced out of the tournament. But then we got something better: a player who appeared out of nowhere to make it to the final. Poland’s Maja Chwalińska, the 114th-ranked player who dropped out of the sport for a time because of depression, finished as runner up to No. 8 seed Mirra Andreeva, a player not all that well-known herself but at least she is ranked. Chwalinska was a French Open qualifier, with career earnings of $864,030 prior to this tournament before adding another $1.6 million before even getting to the final. At age 24, Chwalinska’s got plenty of time to continue to build on her Roland Garros success and have a nice career. And if she doesn’t, she’s got one great story to tell.

For ESPN’s Mina Kimes, Calling the National Spelling Bee Is a ‘Homecoming’

Washington Post: OK, OK, I have a thing for spelling bees. I admit it. Even so, it was fun to see the sports and spelling bee worlds come together this year with Scripps National Spelling Bee commentary from ESPN’s Mina Kimes. Kimes, best known for her football analyst work, is carving a niche as a bit of a nerd (to me, that’s a compliment). She recently won “Celebrity Jeopardy!”, nabbing a cool $1 million for a Los Angeles charity, and even had been a “phone a friend” for chef David Chang to help him win $1 million on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” She did go to Yale, after all. “She’s made her intellect part of her brand, and I feel like that matches the Bee so well,” Corrie Loeffler, the Bee’s executive director, told the Post. “She is so good on the sports side of things, so obviously is very in tune with the competitive drive behind what these kids do, but then also brings this intellectual side with her that will match the academic strength and kind of the brain-sport side of what these kids do.”

At the Women’s College World Series, There’s No College Sports ‘Crisis’ in Sight

The Athletic: This week, two big things happened in college athletics. The NCAA crowned a softball champion (Texas repeating), and the Senate gathered for a hearing to discuss the Protect College Sports Act in the Senate. Sure, not all is right in the college sports world, but, The Athletic’s Stewart Mandel says, you wouldn’t know it if you actually experience an event and surround yourself with athletes and their joyful march toward a championship. “Broken, you say?” Mandel writes. “Can’t say it felt that way at this timeless slice of Americana, where the grandmotherly ushers hand-deliver home run balls to players’ moms, kids do a pizza-box relay race on the field between innings, and a concession-stand hamburger costs $7.50.” He does get into the NIL money, some brutal rivalries in softball and the feelings toward Texas Tech and its open-checkbook policy. Still, he says, “the prevailing notion that everything is on fire and the entire enterprise is on the brink of collapse is, quite simply, fiction.”

‘Yeah, Baby! Only 61 Years!’

C-SPAN: Having a celebrity offer up a commencement speech is just how things work every May. But at Cal State Los Angeles on May 18, commencement speaker Billie Jean King was among her peers – the Class of 2026. King, 82, worked in the last couple years to complete the degree she set aside to pursue a life of tennis and working for equality. Yet, the degree was always a piece of unfinished business. So now, it’s not enough that King’s name is on the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, it’s on a diploma, too. It’s a lesson in persistence worthy of a champion.

Share

Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”

Buy Me a Coffee

I’m happy to join fellow Iowa writers and journalists as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. The collaborative is more than 70 writers throughout the state - likely some familiar names to longtime Iowa readers - publishing on topics ranging from politics to food to sports and so much more. With a subscription to the IWC newsletter, readers get two weekly compilations of stories: a news roundup on Sundays, and The Flipside, a feature-filled newsletter that arrives on Wednesdays.

Meet the writers here, and see for yourself the great variety the collaborative offers.

Share

A couple years before Molly Huyck opened a women’s sports bar in Omaha, she wondered if it might be too soon. The entrepreneur, a lifelong sports fan, had seen what was happening in other cities and thought a similar bar would be a good fit for her hometown; the question was if the time was now or later.

Then in August 2023, when 92,003 fans packed into Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Neb., to watch a volleyball match, she knew the time was right.

“In my career, I’m usually like two years ahead of where I think the business should be, I’m always out there strategically,” Huyck said. “So I was a little worried I was too far ahead, wondering, ‘Is it too soon?’

“But that was really a defining moment.”

SET The Bar opened in March 2025, giving women’s sports fans in Omaha a hub to watch the teams they love.

And in Omaha, there is a multitude to choose from. Sure, it’s not home to a team in the WNBA, NWSL or PWHL, but things are pretty good for women’s sports in Omaha these days. What’s driving it just a little different.

This occurred to me in January, when I had made the 2-hour road trip from Des Moines on a chilly weekend to watch the Creighton women’s basketball team host top-ranked Connecticut. While the Bluejays were having a down season for them and the game wasn’t pretty, it was still a fun women’s sports weekend in town and a little bit beyond. The next day, Iowa was playing at Nebraska, just under an hour away in Lincoln. And the two women’s pro volleyball teams, the Omaha Supernovas of Major League Volleyball and LOVB Nebraska, had just begun their seasons.

Still to come was softball. The Creighton women’s softball team was awaiting warmer weather when they could play in their new stadium. Nebraska was eagerly awaiting their next season with the best player in the country, Jordy Frahm, who would indeed lead them to a dream season that included a No. 1 ranking, home-field sellouts of over 3,000 people, culminating in a trip to the Women’s College World Series. The Huskers lost on Sunday to Texas, ending their season at 52-8.

“There’s some great momentum,” said Kirsten Bernthal Booth, president of operations for LOVB Nebraska and former Creighton volleyball coach. “Everyone likes a winner.”

Last fall, The Athletic created a list of best women’s sports cities. Predictably, it included cities where there are teams in the major sports leagues (the Bay Area topped the list; the Twin Cities were second). That’s all well and good, but it overlooks what is going on, too, in cities like Omaha. That’s in no small part because what is driving the interest in Nebraska’s largest city is different from what the bigger cities offer.

“I joke that – not joke, really – it is a volleyball state,” said Creighton women’s basketball coach Jim Flanery, who has seen more tall, athletic high school girls prefer volleyball to his sport than he’d like. “But I also think that doesn’t hurt our sport. It only helps our sport because people are like, ‘Well, geez, these guys are really good.’

“I think volleyball helps people identify that women’s sports are worthy of their time. That’s a big thing.”

Subscribe now

Certainly, the University of Nebraska, is not in Omaha; Creighton is, as well as Nebraska-Omaha, both Division I schools. But with Lincoln just under an hour away from Omaha depending on how much you gun it on I-80, that’s practically a suburb by Midwest standards. And it’s different than a no-big-time pro city like Des Moines, which is in a state that splits its loyalties between two major-conference Division I teams, Iowa and Iowa State (with Drake and Northern Iowa along for the ride). And Iowa State, in Ames just up I-35, is closer than the flagship University of Iowa (2 hours away).

Huyck said Husker volleyball is the top draw at SET The Bar – after all, she put volleyball right in the place’s name. Husker matches will pack the place, and the way athletes are so accessible through their social media helps connect them with fans, too, Huyck said. In fact, when former Huskers star Lexi Rodriguez, now playing for LOVB Nebraska, came to the bar, she posted on her Instagram that she was there just to watch something on TV and not as any promotional or guest appearance.

“I didn’t know,” said Huyck, who was not there. “I said, ‘Why is somebody not calling me?’ But my team gave her a free brownie and did all the right things.”

Husker fans need a place to watch a match, since tickets are hard to come by – the five-time NCAA champions have sold out home matches since 2001, since before current team members were born. Ditto this season for the softball team, which broke attendance record after attendance record

But it’s not just Nebraska that helps make Omaha a volleyball town for its women’s sports fans: Hometown team Creighton has had great success, too. The Bluejays have made it to the Elite Eight the past two seasons and have been in the NCAA tournament 14 seasons in a row.

The Bluejays are a tough ticket, too. They have sold out their season tickets the past two seasons at on-campus D.J. Sokol Arena, capacity 2,950. Last season the Bluejays averaged 3,295 fans a game – a figure that surpassed their arena size because they moved a match against Nebraska to the larger CHI Health Center Arena. That match drew 17,675 people, setting an NCAA indoor record for volleyball.

“My dream was always that people would be scalping tickets out front,” said Bernthal Booth, who left her Creighton job in 2024 to take the LOVB Nebraska front office job. “That was the idea, you want to make it a commodity.”

Did the scalpers show up?

“A couple times,” she said.

That volleyball madness is why both new women’s pro leagues chose to have a team in Omaha. The Supernovas were league runners-up in what was their third season of play that ended last month. They won the championship in the league’s first season, in the then-Pro Volleyball Federation that became Major League Volleyball.

LOVB Nebraska’s roster included Candelaria Herrera, a former Iowa State player and Olympian from Argentina, and Jaali Winters, a four-time All-American at Creighton who is from Ankeny.

“The sell is, at least from a volleyball standpoint, you’ve watched these players in college, you’ve become attached to them, and now you get an opportunity to see them continue to play here in our country,” Bernthal Booth said. “Or some of the best players in the world are excited to come to the United States. So you get to see both.”

Year-round volleyball keeps women’s sports in the media year-round too, a far cry from what the coaches once saw for their programs.

It was long a frustration at Creighton, Flanery said, for him and former head coach Connie Yori. Flanery, a former Creighton men’s basketball player, had joined Yori’s staff in 1992 and both had high expectations for how girls’ and women’s sports could be covered – they were Iowans.

“I had a sister a year older and we would play girl-boy doubleheaders in my sister’s six-on-six days,” said Flanery, from Guthrie Center. “We would joke because like a third of the people in the gym would leave after the girls’ game.”

Yori got a lot of media attention as a star basketball and softball player at Ankeny who went on to play at Creighton. Well before Title IX, girls’ high school sports got good coverage in the Des Moines Register and that continued as the colleges added women’s programs.

“Connie and I would talk a lot about, ‘Why can’t we get more coverage in the [Omaha] World-Herald?’” Flanery said. “Because we grew up with the Des Moines Register, we were used to [coverage] so we would complain about that. We’d wonder, ‘How can we get more visibility if we don’t get the coverage?’”

It’s much better now, Flanery said. Bernthal Booth has seen a change, too.

“When I took the job at Creighton [in 2003], there was a little blurb in the Omaha World-Herald,” she said. “When Brian [Rosen] took over for me, it was front page of the newspaper. So totally different, which is awesome.”

Creighton’s visibility got a boost in 2013 when the Bluejays left the Missouri Valley Conference to join the Big East, giving the school’s entire athletic program more cache in the college world by joining basketball powers such as UConn. Even before that, facilities for men’s and women’s sports had gotten a boost in 2003 with the opening of the CHI Health Center Arena and D.J. Sokol Arena in 2009. Gone were the days of playing basketball in the 1950s Civic Auditorium or sometimes the 1929 Ak-Sar-Ben Coliseum on the grounds of a horse racing complex.

Still, Flanery has no illusions about what is bringing the most eyes women’s sports in his city.

“Nebraska volleyball has been a huge driver in that space,” he said. “They’re kind of rock stars.”

That’s precisely what the major media markets and national media don’t quite understand about a city like Omaha. A mid-sized good sports city – also home to the College World Series and Olympic swim trials – with a huge state school in its back yard in some ways does have a pro team. And it was the case before the whole NIL thing began.

Huyck was secure in that knowledge when she began researching the viability of a women’s sports bar in Omaha. She even visited Rough & Tumble, the women’s sports bar in Seattle and asked the owner if she thought Omaha was too small a city for such a business.

“Her advice was, ‘Well, you should have a pro team to kind of be your key sort of foundation,’” Huyck said. “I said, ‘Well, we have the Huskers.’ And for all intents and purposes, I’d say that’s a pro team.”

Take that, Bay Area.

Share

Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”

Buy Me a Coffee

I’m happy to join fellow Iowa writers and journalists as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. The collaborative is more than 70 writers throughout the state - likely some familiar names to longtime Iowa readers - publishing on topics ranging from politics to food to sports and so much more. With a subscription to the IWC newsletter, readers get two weekly compilations of stories: a news roundup on Sundays, and The Flipside, a feature-filled newsletter that arrives on Wednesdays.

Meet the writers here, and see for yourself the great variety the collaborative offers.

Share

Update 5-26-26: This includes updates of how these teams/athletes did after the weekend. It was a good one for all of them.

This week, my Iowa Writers Collaborative colleague (and former Cedar Rapids Gazette sports columnist) Mike Hlas wrote a tongue-in-cheek “100 things I felt you needed to know right here right now.” And before your eyes pop out of your head, there are only 19 things on the list. Journalists are famous for being really bad at math.

Beyond snark about pickleball, driverless cars and Olympic break dancing, Mike utters one inalienable truth: America changed for the worse once sports stopped having off-seasons. (It’s right there at No. 13, which came after No. 9.)

I think about this a lot, like when the NFL makes a 2-hour TV special out of announcing next season’s schedule or when a sports section on a warm, sunny day in early May has nothing but college basketball in it. But I mostly think of it when I get to hear or read about what is going on in a spring sport – as in a sport that is actually played in the spring. (What a concept!)

But if spring is a time for flowers, chirping birds and turning on your furnace and your air conditioner in the same week, it’s also the time for relay races and softball games and, on days it doesn’t rain, golf. So here are a few spring things that show what should also be part of the sports conversation, too. (Full disclosure, though: I have stories coming up that will have some basketball and other out-of-season sports, too.)

Simpson softball making some history

It’s not enough for the Simpson softball team to make a little school history, but the Storm did it in dramatic fashion. On Saturday, the Storm rallied in the bottom of the seventh to defeat Saint Benedict, 4-3, to reach an NCAA Division III Super Regional for the first time in school history.

That’s not to say success has eluded the Storm in their history but this will be Simpson’s farthest move through the tournament since winning the national championship in 1999. (Central is the last champion from Iowa, winning the title in 2003.)

Simpson will take a 37-6 record to Winona, Minn., today (May 21) to take on St. Mary’s (Minn.). The winner of the two-day best-of-three super regional will head to the Division III World Series May 28-June 3 in Salem, Va.

My Iowa Writers Collaborative colleague Daniel P. Finney has been covering Simpson’s NCAA journey for the Indianola Independent Advocate and also wrote a feature on Simpson star Megan Heidelbauer – an unlikely slugger who stands just 5 foot 2.

Simpson earned its place in the World Series, defeating Saint Mary’s twice to earn the trip to Salem, Va. Simpson, seeded third, will play sixth-seeded Mount Union at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday (May 28).

Wow-ee Waukee Northwest

Every year, the Drake Relays gives awards at the end of the weekend – one each for the top male and female collegiate runner, and one each for the top high school boy and girl. This year’s award was a little different though: When it came to the girls, it wasn’t just one winner; it was a group of relay runners.

That indecision was understandable – how could anyone choose among the ways the Wolves dominated? Eleven runners made up five relay teams that established Iowa all-time bests in five events: the 4x100, 4x200, 4x400, 4x800 and the shuttle hurdle relay. They could “only” manage a runner-up finish in the sprint medley relay. The Wolves also didn’t win the title in the 4x100 because they dropped the baton in the final but they’d set a state record in the preliminary round.

Even so, not a bad weekend on the Blue Oval.

The state track meet, with boys and girls, begins today (May 21) at Drake Stadium. Look for the Wolves to dominate again – they’ve got the top qualifying times in the 4x100, 4x200 and 4x400 relays with the second-fastest qualifying times in the sprint and distance medley relays as well as the shuttle hurdle relay. In addition, Katie Willits has the top qualifying times in the 100 and 200 and the second-fastest qualifying time in the 110 hurdles. (Track success runs in the Willits family; her sister Sydney won the NCAA indoor long jump title for Iowa State in 2024.)

The state track meet belonged to the Waukee Northwest girls. They won the Class 4-A team title in record fashion — with 150.5 team points to obliterate the previous high of 126.5 points set by Davenport Assumption in 2016. The Wolves won titles in the shuttle hurdle, 4x100, 4x200, 4x400 and 4x800 relays, and were second in the sprint medley relay. Katie Willits won the 100 and 200, while finishing second in the 100 hurdles.

Cyclone golfers make some history, too

Last month, the Iowa State women’s golf team won its first Big 12 title in program history. The last conference title the Cyclones had won was in 1993, when they were in the Big Eight.

Sophomore Nichakorn Pinprayoon of Thailand, part of an international lineup for Iowa State, took co-medalist honors at the conference meet. The Cyclones entered the final day of the tournament trailing by six shots and rallied to win by six shots.

The Cyclones, with a lineup that includes three golfers from Thailand, one from China and one from Spain, head to California this weekend for the NCAA meet. It’s the Cyclones’ second consecutive trip to the national meet, third in school history.

The Cyclones finished ninth, their best season in school history. Iowa State finished 22^nd (2025) and 23^rd (2014) in their first two trips to the NCAA Championships. The Cyclones were led by senior Pammy Chookaew, who finished in a tie for 23rd overall. She shot 289 (+1) over the four rounds. Sophomore Alexandra Vidal tied for 34th with a 292 (+4).

Kavan has Longhorns on a roll in softball

Teagan Kavan, the ace from West Des Moines for No. 3 Texas, did her job over the weekend with a complete-game shutout to send the defending national champion Longhorns to this weekend’s NCAA Super Regional with a 7-0 victory over Baylor.

Kavan, a junior who attended Dowling Catholic but did not play for the Maroons, was Most Outstanding Player of last year’s Women’s College World Series. She’s picked right up from there, going 24-4 this season.

Top-seeded Texas (45-10) opens super regional play Friday (May 22) against No. 5 seed Arizona State.

Texas advanced to the Women’s College World Series with a chance to defend its title. Teagan Kavan pitched a complete-game shutout Saturday as the Longhorns beat Arizona State 5-0 to advance. The Division I series begins Thursday; Texas plays at 2:30 p.m. that day, on ESPN. Games throughout the tournament will be on ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC.

Cyclone women’s wrestling charges into the future

OK, so wrestling is a winter sport but the new Cyclone program has a lot of work to do to get ready for its fall 2027 launch. They’re off to a good start.

The Cyclones signed two transfers with impressive resumes in NAIA and international competition. Piper Fowler, an under-17 world and NAIA champion, announced last week that she will transfer from William Penn to Iowa State. It’s a big get for the Cyclones, as the sophomore from Cleveland, Tenn., won an NAIA title last winter and will represent the U.S. at the World Team Trials in Slovakia in August. And on Wednesday, the Cyclones announced the addition of Christianah Ogunsanya, who also is transferring from William Penn. Ogunsanya is a two-time NAIA champion and represented Nigeria in the 2024 Olympics.

That shows the immediate impact of another new Cyclone, but this one is on the staffing side. Fowler and Ogunsanya’s coach, Jake Kadel, will join Alli St. John’s Cyclone staff as an assistant. Kadel, a former Hawkeye wrestler, has spent the last three years at William Penn. In that time, the Lady Statesmen had three top 5 NAIA finishes and nine national champions. William Penn also had another Olympian, Nigeria’s Esther Kolawole.

Basketball might be getting all the headlines about the transfer portal right now, but look for a lot of wrestling transfers make their way to Ames – particularly from the NAIA and Division III, where Iowa teams and athletes have been finding success.

Flag football keeps moving along in Des Moines

Now this is football that truly is in season. For the second year in a row, the Des Moines Public Schools organized a girls’ flag football league. And for the second spring in a row, Dowling Catholic reigned as league champion.

The Maroons beat Lincoln, 43-6, to repeat as champions in the independent league that is not sanctioned by the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union but gets financial support from the NFL as a youth initiative for girls and boys. Harding won the middle school title.

Flag football will be in the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Its further path as a high school sport in Iowa is so far unclear, but for now it’s a spring fling for girls throughout the city and perhaps one that is making its mark.

“It’s awesome to be try to be the start of something new and it’s going to awesome to be the one who is looked up to,” Dowling quarterback Olivia Meredith told WOI-TV. “It’s just dope.”

Well said.

Share

Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”

Buy Me a Coffee

I’m happy to join fellow Iowa writers and journalists as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. The collaborative is more than 70 writers throughout the state - likely some familiar names to longtime Iowa readers - publishing on topics ranging from politics to food to sports and so much more. With a subscription to the IWC newsletter, readers get two weekly compilations of stories: a news roundup on Sundays, and The Flipside, a feature-filled newsletter that arrives on Wednesdays.

Meet the writers here, and see for yourself the great variety the collaborative offers.

When it comes to the Iowa state track and field meet, it’s easy to think of the high school legends that have graced the track at Drake Stadium: Lolo Jones, Natasha Kaiser, Debbie Esser, Shelby Houlihan, Stephanie Jenks.

But I think of something else: Chucking a basketball like a discus and winning a state title.

Think I’m making something up? I am not. In 1962, the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union hosted a state track meet for the first time. There were a few events that don’t exist anymore and I don’t just mean because of the metric system taking over.

In 1989, the Des Moines Register’s Rachel Blount wrote a great story about some of those events and that story has stuck in my head for 37 years. She tracked down the woman who won that 1962 title when she was a teenager – Kay (Houston) Justice of Dow City-Arion who threw the ball 92 feet. According to Blount:

“It was pretty unwieldy,” Justice said, noting that some accuracy was important because of the damage the basketball could do to the head of an unsuspecting bystander. “It didn’t last long.”

It lasted just a year and was replaced by the discus – a little heavier but more traditional to track and field. Justice, who died in 2011, was the only champion in the basketball throw. And likely always will be.

The Iowa state track meet, girls and boys, is May 21-23 at Drake Stadium. No doubt lifetime memories will be made for many of the athletes there.

This month’s 6-on-6 collects a few memorable stories about girls’ and women’s sports. It might seem like a slower time of year since we’re being fed a steady diet of spring football, NFL draft and basketball portal news, but it’s clear there’s plenty of other stuff going on.

Allyson Felix Announces Her Comeback, Aiming for 2028 Los Angeles Olympics

Time: Since she was a teenager winning medals at world championships and at the 2004 Olympics until she retired in 2022, Allyson Felix was my favorite track athlete. She ran with grace and joy and used her own challenges to help her sport – including calling out Nike for its lack of support when she wanted to take time off to start a family. She then moved with grace into post-retirement, launching a women’s sports management firm. But something has been missing, Felix said, and she is returning to training at age 40 with a goal of qualifying for the 2028 Olympics in her hometown of Los Angeles. While 1980s Drake Relays favorite Merlene Ottey, a former Nebraska runner, competed and medaled into her 40s for Jamaica and Slovenia, no U.S. sprinter has ever qualified in their 40s. Hopefully Felix’s comeback will go better than that of Lindsay Vonn, 42, who crashed at the recent Winter Games and suffered devastating ankle and leg injuries that have required five surgeries.

‘We’re Hated Not Only if We’re Sexual but Simply for Existing’

Let’s Row Together: It would be nice if all stories about female athletes were happy ones, but that’s just not the world we live in. And the world we live in is often infuriating, particularly when it seems as if we are going backward. In Melissa Ludtke’s excellent Substack, she tells the story of 15-year-old Charlotte Rollins of Masconomet, Mass., the only girl on her high school golf team and one of its best players. But instead of getting support from her teammates, she got bullying and harassment. Online. On the bus. In the halls at school. Ludtke, who was born in Iowa City, knows a thing or two about simply trying to exist in spaces in which men think they own; while working for Sports Illustrated, she was the plaintiff in Ludtke v. Kuhn, the landmark 1978 case that granted female reporters access to Major League Baseball locker rooms (the subject of her book, “Locker Room Talk.”) It’s not just disheartening that harassment of women in these spaces continues (hello Shilo Sanders), but that it’s perpetuated generation after generation and seems increasingly vile and frightening with the advent of social media, digital communications and bro and political cultures that denigrate women.

Jamie Peterson Named NCAA Division III Men’s Volleyball Coach of the Year

WittenbergTigers.com: Until Penn State won the NCAA Division I volleyball title in 2025, no female coach had ever won a national championship since the NCAA began sponsoring the sport in 1982. That just seemed … insane. At Ohio’s Wittenberg University, the tables turned just a little bit. In her first year as a head coach, Jamie Peterson led the school’s men’s team to the Division III Final Four, where the Tigers lost in the national semifinals. Peterson was a three-time Atlantic 10 Player of the Year at Dayton and had been an assistant on Wittenberg’s women’s team for two seasons before taking the men’s head coaching job. The Tigers finished 24-6 this season and lost to Carthage in the Final Four.

She Was Coached by John Wooden — and Just Won UCLA Another Basketball Title

Wall Street Journal: The NCAA basketball season seems a million years ago by now, but I couldn’t throw a collection of stories together without mentioning this charming piece about the bond between UCLA Coach Cori Close and the legendary John Wooden. With 10 NCAA titles to his name, the Wizard of Westwood ended up coaching Close, too, but not as a player. As a 20-something assistant coach at UCLA, Close began visiting with Wooden to soak up knowledge. At the top of his list was that you could win by treating players with decency and respect, not by berating them or using alleged tough love. “That wasn’t how I wanted to lead,” Close told reporter Rachel Bachman. “You can care about who they’re becoming as people more than who they’re becoming as basketball players and still compete at the highest of levels.” Close moved on from UCLA but continued to meet with Wooden when she could. He never knew of her return to the Bruins, he died at age 99 in 2010, a year before Close came back. Now, she’s got a national championship banner that can hang with the 10 won by the man who in many ways helped shape her as a coach.

Dystany Spurlock’s Road from 18-Wheelers to NASCAR as First Black Woman Driver

USA Today: Of course it’s impressive and historic that Dystany Spurlock is moving up the NASCAR circuit and will race at Watkins Glen on Friday, but it’s also cool that she has a commercial driver’s license and can actually drive the truck that hauls her race car onto the track. But the racing is pretty cool, too. In fact, Spurlock will race twice on Friday – in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series and ARCA Menards Series General Tire 100. Both are stepping stones to the premier NASCAR Cup series, a dream for the lifelong racing fan who is no stranger to entering male-dominated domains; she played high school football, too. “That was the beginning of me doing something in a male dominated field and then it just kept going — tractor trailers, racing motorcycles, NASCAR,” Spurlock said. “To me, it’s normal, because that’s all I know. It does not faze me at all.”

We Are the Cool Kids Now with Amber Cox

Good Game with Sarah Spain: If you’re looking for insightful – and entertaining – conversation about Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever, minus all the noise that the trolls and the intense fan base can generate, look no further than Sarah Spain’s daily podcast. Indiana Fever GM and COO Amber Cox talks about leading and navigating the world around the Fever – from the magnitude of Clark’s stardom, individual vs. team branding in the sports marketing landscape, the reality of a fanbase that extends well beyond Indianapolis and understanding how that feeds into the tourism draw and the image of the entire community. Cox’s insights into her own career, moving up the ranks as a sports executive primarily in women’s sports, offer great insight into the career opportunities that are out there in sports even for those who will never have a professional playing career.

And a bonus story because it is only tangentially a sport; after all, the Scripps National Spelling Bee used to be on ESPN:

Bee Queen: At the National Spelling Bee, Mary Brooks Rings the Bell and Softens the Blow

dsm Magazine: A spelling bee is as stressful as any athletic event — just ask the thousands if not millions who have participated in one. Or you could ask someone who knows a thing or two about the bee — the Scripps National Spelling Bee’s head judge Mary Brooks of West Des Moines. Brooks is the one who has to deliver the bad news of a missed word with a simple ring of the bell, a task she has done since 2005. Lately she’s gotten a little more TV time as she builds up the kids with words of support before they leave the stage. They’re called “Mary’s moments,” and we probably could all use something like that in our lives. This year’s bee is May 26-28. (Full disclosure: I wrote this story, in my day job as an editor and writer for Business Publications Corp. BPC publishes dsm, the city magazine of Des Moines.)

Share

Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”

Buy Me a Coffee

I’m happy to join fellow Iowa writers and journalists as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. The collaborative is more than 70 writers throughout the state - likely some familiar names to longtime Iowa readers - publishing on topics ranging from politics to food to sports and so much more. With a subscription to the IWC newsletter, readers get two weekly compilations of stories: a news roundup on Sundays, and The Flipside, a feature-filled newsletter that arrives on Wednesdays.

Meet the writers here, and see for yourself the great variety the collaborative offers.

Share

The WNBA is about to begin its 30^th season, but also its third season as a true phenomenon. I remain gobsmacked by the seemingly sudden intensity of the fandom, so much of it new. It brings me joy and it also puzzles me in a way; I’ve been so close to the sport for so long I have a little trouble answering the questions of “Why now?” “What sparked this sudden intense passion?” or even “Who ARE you?” The answer goes beyond the rise of Caitlin Clark. I can’t properly explain it because I think it should have happened 30 years ago. So I reached out to one of the new fans with the hope that maybe she could express it in a way that I simply cannot. Meet Lisa Lavia Ryan, huge women’s basketball fan – a description no one would have used about her four years ago, including herself.

It’s Sunday, and my son and his family just left my house. I’m scrambling to finish some household chores and do a couple things for work so I can make some dinner and be seated in front of the TV by 7.

Grammy night? The latest episode of my current Apple TV binge? The drop of a new documentary on the British royal family maybe?

Nope, on all counts. It’s the start of the WNBA preseason. I’m already a couple games behind, with another I want to watch live this evening. It’s crunch time.

Prior to 2022 or so, I couldn’t have named a women’s basketball player, collegiate or professional. I just plain didn’t understand sports fandom; sure, I cheered as a younger mom when my kids played, but I had a hard time understanding some fans’ fierce loyalty to players they didn’t know. I rolled my eyes at my husband’s World Series devotion and was the person who delighted in my phone’s autocorrecting “Super Bowl” to “Superb Owl.”

In short, I’d never been, nor could imagine myself being, a “sports person.”

But here I am: Not only do I subscribe to both versions of the WNBA app so I can watch on my phone AND on Amazon, but I’m reading two books about the history of women’s basketball. Nearly every T-shirt I wear in my off hours bears a team logo, and my social media algorithm serves me wild three-pointers, tunnel fits and speculation about who “won” this year’s NCAAW transfer portal.

If you know me, you’ve likely asked, or at least wondered, what the heck happened. It started as it did for many people who are from West Des Moines and graduated from Dowling Catholic High School: with Caitlin Clark. I’d go to a family gathering, an Iowa game would be on and the sheer spectacle would suck me in.

It sounds cheesy to say that watching those games awakened something, but apparently it did. As my husband says, I can’t just watch something without investing myself in it, and as a writer, I was attracted to the stories of Clark and her teammates. I dug in, and as I learned more, I wanted to keep learning. And watching.

As my fandom grew and I read more about women in their 50s and 60s who have been flocking to WNBA games as never before, my attraction to the world of women’s sports began to make more sense. As a child, I had admired the athletic girls at my school but never assumed I could become one of them. I grew tall early, reaching my full height of 5-foot-4 in fifth grade; we had a basketball hoop in the driveway, and I enjoyed shooting baskets or playing H-O-R-S-E with the neighbor kids. I took dance and was good at it, but at the time I didn’t equate my abilities with athleticism.

I don’t remember what led to this — maybe a desire to please my athletic dad who not-so-secretly hoped at least one of his girls would be sporty — but I did go out for softball. I was in fifth or sixth grade, maybe, and I didn’t love it. I cried on the way home from the second practice, and my dad told me I could quit. I never again attempted a team sport.

At age 50, though, I started running, I’d grown bored with my walking regimen and wanted to see if I could kick things up a notch, and I discovered that I wasn’t unathletic after all. I spent four or five years running races on weekends and winning a handful of medals. No doubt that awakened something as well; I remember standing in the crowd before my first 5K and brushing away tears. I was incredulous that I was in that place, among real athletes.

Running was something that I enjoyed simply for me, not for my kids or my spouse or my dad. And maybe that connects in some way to my women’s basketball fandom: As I watched those first few games with my family, I just felt joy. It wasn’t the social aspect — my family also watches men’s football together, and I have no interest. It was something I instantly recognized as “mine.” Everyone else could have left the room and I would have continued to watch.

Why, as older women, do some of us feel a kinship with this sport many of us never played? For certain, the athleticism is a draw; I love the illustrations of physical prowess, strategic expertise and intelligence that are employed, singularly and collectively, to drive a team to a win. I once mused to the owner of this Substack, “Basketball seems really hard.” She replied, “It is, or everyone would do it.” When I watch, I learn.

Many of us, no doubt, also are drawn to the activism that has characterized the WNBA since its inception. In an article for Bazaar, Shamira Ibrahim discusses players’ 2016 protests against police-involved shootings of Black men and its 2020 game postponements and candlelight vigils over the killings of Breonna Taylor and Jacob Blake. As I learn more about the players — especially the Black, queer athletes on whose backs the league was built — I’m increasingly proud to support those who have used their platforms in meaningful ways.

Most fundamentally, though, there’s no discounting the value in the fact that we’re simply women supporting women. I’m old; when I was in elementary school, boys controlled the playground, barring girls from kickball or tetherball games. When a teacher forced them to allow us, they simply didn’t choose us for a team. I created posters and delivered them to our Catholic church to urge priests to allow girls to be Mass servers; I cheered when Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match. I was aware that society saw women and girls as “less than,” and I cheer not only when I see Dominique Malonga dunk the ball, but when I see A’ja Wilson’s commercials reminding today’s girls that they’re not second to anybody.

Women’s basketball has drawn me even closer to my adult children, who also have become fans; we’ve attended collegiate and pro games together, even making a pilgrimage last year to watch my Fever play my daughter’s beloved Aces. The other night, my daughter and I were on FaceTime lamenting that Natasha Cloud hasn’t yet signed with a team and offering opinions as to why that might be. My spouse walked in the room and shook his head. “Who ARE the two of you?” he asked, smiling.

The best answer: I’m possibly more myself than ever. It’s almost WNBA season, and a historic collective-bargaining agreement has the athletes making more money than the league’s founders would have dreamed. Des Moines has its first women’s sports bar; I have jerseys, two league passes and I know what a crossover is. It’s my game, my time and I’m here for all of it.

Lisa Lavia Ryan has been a writer and editor in the Des Moines area for 40-plus years. For the past 14, she’s written for nonprofit senior living organizations, serving for the last decade as communications lead for WesleyLife. When she’s not hanging out with her grandkids, she watches a whole lot of women’s basketball.

Share

Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”

Buy Me a Coffee

I’m happy to join fellow Iowa writers and journalists as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. The collaborative is more than 70 writers throughout the state - likely some familiar names to longtime Iowa readers - publishing on topics ranging from politics to food to sports and so much more. With a subscription to the IWC newsletter, readers get two weekly compilations of stories: a news roundup on Sundays, and The Flipside, a feature-filled newsletter that arrives on Wednesdays.

Meet the writers here, and see for yourself the great variety the collaborative offers.

In a move that surprised absolutely no one, Iowa State will soon have a women’s wrestling team.

On Thursday, the Iowa State Athletic Department announced it was adding women’s wrestling as the school’s 18th sport, the 11th for women. The sport will begin varsity competition in the 2027-28 season.

The move was not surprising for a couple reasons. It’s Iowa; it stands to reason that the sport’s hotspot would be the place where a second so-called power conference team would offer wrestling for women. That’s the feel-good part of the announcement.

The more cynical take, though, is that the move was perfectly obvious given all the shenanigans happening with gymnastics. On March 3, Iowa State announced it was dropping its women’s gymnastics program, citing unresolvable issues between gymnasts, coaches and parents. Forty-two days later, suddenly there’s an Iowa State women’s wrestling team.

“As late as January, February, there were young women out there in the state who reached out to me and said, ‘Is there ever going to be women’s wrestling?’” ISU Athletic Director Jamie Pollard said at Thursday’s press conference to announce the program. “Those emails haven’t aged well because I said, ‘It’s just not going to happen.’ The thought of adding another sport that time seemed really far-fetched.”

That changed fast. The now-former Cyclone gymnasts can be forgiven for feeling like a first wife who just got dumped for a new, younger wife.

It was clear that without the women’s gymnastics team, Title IX compliance would seemingly require a replacement. (Or maybe not? Ask members of five-time NCAA women’s rugby champ Quinnipiac, Ilona Maher’s alma mater, who saw their varsity sport downgraded to club level this week and replaced with a distance team for men’s track.)

If there was any surprise to the announcement, it was that Iowa State got to this point before fellow wrestling power and Big 12 rival Oklahoma State. The Cowgirl Wrestling Club has been competing against collegiate teams in non-championship/non-sanctioned events and is seemingly on its way to eventual varsity status. For the Cyclones, the loss of another women’s sports paved the way and pushed them to the front of the line.

After the loss of gymnastics, another emerging sport – flag football – was bandied about as a possibility to replace it but really, in Iowa, could it have been anything but wrestling? The move will make Iowa State the 16th four-year institution in the state to offer women’s wrestling but just the second in NCAA Division I after the University of Iowa blazed that trail beginning in the 2023-24 season. In fact, only five other Division I schools nationally offer women’s wrestling and none are from the major athletic conferences like Iowa (Big Ten) or Iowa State (Big 12). In addition, seven community colleges in Iowa offer the sport.

Last season, women’s wrestling shed its label of an NCAA emerging sport and gained full championship status. The first sanctioned NCAA women’s wrestling tournament was held last month at Xtream Arena in Coralville. McKendree won the team title; Iowa was runner-up. Iowa had won a national title the season before, when the National Collegiate Women’s Wrestling Championships was held in Cedar Rapids but not sanctioned by the NCAA.

Subscribe now

In the 2020-2021 season, 561 high school girls wrestled in Iowa. This past season, there were 3,692. The girls’ state tournament began four years ago and next season will add a dual-meet championship.

“The visibility of wrestling in the state and the history of wrestling at Iowa State University aligns women’s wrestling to be that sport,” Pollard said at Thursday’s press conference.

Iowa State has some serious wrestling history. Dan Gable’s legend for some might be his storied coaching career at Iowa, but it was built upon his dominant Iowa State career and Olympic gold medal. Cael Sanderson never lost a collegiate match and won Olympic gold in 2004. Ben Peterson won gold in 1972 and silver in 1976. Three other Cyclones won Olympic gold: Glen Brand (1948), Kevin Jackson (1992) and Jake Varner (2012). That a few women’s names might join those banners at Hilton Coliseum is a noble goal.

The Cyclone women’s new coach knows a thing or two about competing at that level. Alli St. John, who has spent the past three years as director of donor relations for the Cyclone Regional Training Center, was a world silver medalist in 2013 and 2016. Prior to coming to the training center, St. John was a coach at the Big Game Wrestling Club, a youth club in North Liberty. She was an assistant coach at Grand View in 2021-22.

Leading a women’s program at a school like Iowa State was never in her career plans, not because she didn’t want to but because it was something that simply didn’t exist when she grew up in Illinois wrestling against boys.

“Being able to give these women a chance to wrestle at a university like Iowa State is something I could never have imagined until maybe two weeks ago,” St. John said at Thursday’s press conference. “To be given the opportunity is amazing.”

St. John said her first task was to hire a coaching staff and then recruit wrestlers. The team will have 10 scholarships, same as the men.

“My vision is simple,” said St. John, whose husband, Derek, is an assistant coach on the men’s team. “To build a premier program here at Iowa State that not only produces championships but world and Olympic champions.”

The women’s team will have its own training facility. The men practice at Lied Recreation Center, the women will practice at a refurbished Beyer Hall. Beyer Hall is where gymnastics worked out, the same facility that athletes complained about being sub-par and unsafe.

It’s been a whirlwind several months for Iowa State. First football coach Matt Campbell left for Penn State, and so did most of the team. Then gymnastics’ issues began with canceling the remainder of the team’s season, then dropping the sport altogether. Then the women’s basketball team saw a mass exodus of players into the transfer portal, including superstar Audi Crooks.

Even Thursday wasn’t just about women’s wrestling. Head men’s coach Kevin Dresser left that post to become director of wrestling, overseeing both programs. Brent Metcalf was named as his successor.

You can’t blame the administration for enjoying the moment on Thursday, getting a chance to share some good news after getting thrown to the mat a few times in recent months. But with the announcement about the women’s team, the athletic department might have just scored a very big escape.

Share

Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”

Buy Me a Coffee

I’m happy to join fellow Iowa writers and journalists as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. The collaborative is more than 70 writers throughout the state - likely some familiar names to longtime Iowa readers - publishing on topics ranging from politics to food to sports and so much more. With a subscription to the IWC newsletter, readers get two weekly compilations of stories: a news roundup on Sundays, and The Flipside, a feature-filled newsletter that arrives on Wednesdays.

Meet the writers here, and see for yourself the great variety the collaborative offers.

Share

OK, sure, basketball season is not quite over and there’s still a lot to process from the Final Four and the transfer portal. That’s all well and good, but it’s also good to give the looming spring sports their due. Particularly one of the best spring things to happen in Iowa sports – and it’s not spring football.

On April 23-25, we get the 116th running of the Drake Relays in Des Moines. Even if you aren’t a track and field fan, there’s no denying its spectacle. And while some of the best athletes have headed farther east to the bigger paydays at the Penn Relays, there is still great beauty on the Blue Oval. To me, track and field (or “athletics”) is the purest of sports: Gun goes off, people run, fastest one wins; someone throws something, the farthest one wins; someone jumps, the highest one wins. Judges and officials are there to enforce rules, not choose winners.

It’s also a sport with so much beautiful history, and the Drake Relays carries that history well. One of my favorite stories about the Relays is about the first woman to race there – Olympic legend Wilma Rudolph in 1961. Yes, it took until 1961 for the Relays to have a race for girls or women. And this race had both.

Chuck Schoffner, a longtime sports writer for The Associated Press based in Des Moines, told the story of Rudolph’s day at Drake on its 50^th anniversary in the 2011 Relays program that has no digital link. It’s a story not often told, but it’s a good one.

After Rudolph became an international star at the Rome Olympics eight months earlier with three gold medals – 100 and 200 meters, 4x100 relay – Drake Relays officials knew they needed to try to bring her to Des Moines. They succeeded but had less luck trying to find competition for her – there were few female collegiate runners and while some Iowa high schools had girls’ teams, the sport wasn’t particularly organized.

So Relays officials found five high school girls to run against the Olympic champion. Mary Strand of Prairie View of Gowrie wore her softball cleats. Peggy Riemenschneider of State Center borrowed shoes from one of the boys on the track team. But, they ran against the Olympic champion.

“She was so cool about everything,” June Kettering-Murray told Schoffner in 2011, “and we were all just shaking.”

It’s no spoiler to say Rudolph won the race, in 11.1 seconds. Strand, in her softball cleats, was second in 12.0.

The girls got some autographs and a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but they got something else: a legacy. The next year, the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union hosted a girls’ state track meet for the first time.

It just goes to show there are a million good stories out there waiting to be found. Here are six that caught my eye in recent weeks.

Olympic Champion Katie Moon Discusses Her Upcoming Pole Vault Season

MindBody Marathon: This is from a year ago, but I went hunting around to learn more about pole vaulter Katie Moon when I found out she would be competing at the Drake Relays. And, a bonus: She’ll be competing twice. She will be part of the traditional competition at the event at Drake Stadium, but she’ll also be at the mall. Yes, you read that right. Once again there will be a Drake Relays exhibition event at Jordan Creek Town Center on April 20, and Moon, the Tokyo 2021 gold medalist and Paris 2024 silver medalist, will participate. In this podcast/video, Moon talks about her mental and physical preparation for events, but also gets to the heart of what I always want to know about pole vaulters: Why? It was just in her nature, Moon says. “I was always doing things that stressed my mom out and put me in some sort of danger,” she says about her interest in the event. Yeah, that tracks.

When You’re a Shark, You’re a Shark All the Way

dsm magazine: One tidbit people forget about girls’ sports in Iowa is that despite their storied history, not every school participated. Big schools, for the most part, didn’t compete until it was mandated with Title IX. So with limited options, some schools found their own way. At Des Moines’ Theodore Roosevelt High School 100 years ago, the Roosevelt Sharks synchronized swimming team was born. It wasn’t just the first sport for girls, it was the first club for girls, period. Since then, generations of girls – some within the same family – train, fund-raise, coach, mentor and hold an annual “pageant” performance that they work toward all school year. Barbara Dietrich Boose talked to current Sharks and alums of all ages, and even got the skinny on what holds their hair in place. The story didn’t inspire me to try to poke my legs out of the water and try to stay afloat, but it did inspire me to get a ticket for the Sharks’ annual pageant at the end of the month. Can’t wait.

This High School Player May Be the Most Lauded Recruit To Ever Come Out of Bay Area Basketball

San Francisco Chronicle: With all the talk about who is leaving college basketball teams, it seems a good time to learn about who is arriving. Longtime Bay Area sports writer Ann Killion profiles McKenna Woliczko, Iowa’s highly ranked recruit who chose the Hawkeyes over South Carolina, Southern Cal and Ohio State. Despite playing an entirely different position than Caitlin Clark, the comparisons are rolling in nonetheless in part because of Woliczko’s national profile. Forget that, though, says her high school coach. “Comparisons are the thief of joy,” she said.

Former ISU Gymnasts, Coaches Say Practice Facility Was Unsafe, Outdated

Des Moines Register: Lost in the craziness of March Madness and the incredibly shrinking Iowa State women’s basketball team has been the quickly forgotten train wreck that is the Iowa State women’s gymnastics program. In March, the school announced it was dropping the sport due to what Athletic Director Jamie Pollard described as “irreconcilable differences” in the program. Tommy Birch’s deep dive on the situation talks to players who describe equipment so inadequate as to be dangerous, a facility with no air conditioning in warm weather and undependable heat in cold weather, and other issues. Players and coaches say one thing, administration says another, but Birch does a good job laying out the crux of the matter: It’s a mess.

Oklahoma Softball Reaches Incredible Milestone, Led by Freshman Kendall Wells

Sports Illustrated: College softball has a new superstar and no big surprise – she’s from Oklahoma. But even by Sooner standards, Kendall Wells is having a jaw-dropping debut. She has 30 home runs and with nearly two months left in the season (counting the College Softball World Series), she’s got a legit shot at breaking the single-season home run record of 37 set by Arizona’s Laura Espinoza in 1995. “I’ve seen Jocelyn Alo. I’ve seen Lauren Chamberlain,” Oklahoma Coach Patty Gasso said of her former players who are the current and previous career home run leaders (Alo holds the record with 122). “This is something new, this is different. It is some of the most elite power I’ve ever seen from a young player, and she came in like that.” To check out Wells’ home run derby yourself, the Sooners’ next series is April 10-11-12 against Texas, led by ace pitcher and West Des Moines Dowling grad Teagan Kavan. Friday’s game is on ESPN2, the other two are on ESPN.

WNBA Players Had an Ace Up Their Sleeve in Pay Negotiations: A Nobel Laureate

Wall Street Journal: Last month, the surprise – in fact the jaw-dropping result – of the WNBA labor negotiations wasn’t so much that a deal was reached but the deal itself. The new collective bargaining agreement gave players a nearly 400% raise and a boost in average salary to $580,000, up from $118,000. Advising the players union through their negotiations was Claudia Goldin, a Nobel Prize winner in economics who accepted the union’s request for guidance with one caveat: She did not want to be paid. Goldin has spent her career tracking pay and documenting women’s changing role in the workplace. Helping further the WNBA’s cause was a decision as easy as a layup, though Goldin never played sports growing up in the 1950s. According to the story by Rachel Bachman and Justin Lahart, Goldin was a supremely steadying force in the negotiations. Terri Carmichael Jackson, executive director of the players union, said Goldin was unbothered when things got tense or frustrating. “She’d say, ‘It’s just math,’” Jackson said. It sure added up for the WNBA players.

Share

Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”

Buy Me a Coffee

I’m happy to join fellow Iowa writers and journalists as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. The collaborative is more than 70 writers throughout the state - likely some familiar names to longtime Iowa readers - publishing on topics ranging from politics to food to sports and so much more. With a subscription to the IWC newsletter, readers get two weekly compilations of stories: a news roundup on Sundays, and The Flipside, a feature-filled newsletter that arrives on Wednesdays.

Meet the writers here, and see for yourself the great variety the collaborative offers.

Share

It’s the nature of the beast and a pure mathematical fact that in sports, things rarely end the way you want them to. Games. Seasons. Careers.

When the Iowa State women’s basketball team received a No. 8 seed in the NCAA tournament, its 17th consecutive NCAA bid, no one would have seen it all come crashing down a mere 20 days later.

The only thing that could be seen by Day 20 was Audi Crooks entering the transfer portal on Thursday. She was the 10^th Cyclone to do that and her announcement wasn’t a surprise – or shouldn’t have been to anyone paying attention – so much as it was inevitable. By now, the question was no longer if she would go but why would she stay?

With pretty much no teammates left, even if she began and ended her junior season with no plan to transfer, her senior season was already ruined. Can you blame her for not wanting to start all over, not even factoring in NIL deals that might come her way?

When the first couple of portal announcements happened, it seemed to signal that perhaps Coach Bill Fennelly was about to retire. A busy day Thursday for Iowa State’s athletic communications department made it clear that’s not about to happen; it was emphasized in a video featuring Athletic Director Jamie Pollard talking about the situation, followed by a social media post later in the day from Fennelly saying, essentially, that he’s looking forward to next season. Doesn’t sound like retirement to me.

This is the world we live in now with college athletics, and it’s not just Iowa State. The On3 website reports that there are 524 players women’s players who have entered the transfer portal that doesn’t even officially open until Monday, and then it will be open for 15 days.

With one year left on his contract, Fennelly, 68, might have been lucky enough to escape the vicissitudes of the current landscape and sail smoothly to retirement when the time came. But the new world found him. Instead, he’s looking at possibly the biggest challenge of his 38-year head coaching career at a time when he could be looking at fabulous vacation packages.

It happens to the best, these endings we can’t quite plan. Vivian Stringer’s Hall of Fame coaching career came to a strange ending at Rutgers that included a year-long post-pandemic leave of absence before she retired. While Tara Van Derveer said her retirement from Stanford wasn’t about the current college landscape, it was melancholy timing that paralleled the demise of the Pac-12. Pat Summitt’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis was a shocking end to a legendary career. Heck, soccer superstar Megan Rapinoe tore an Achilles tendon moments into her final professional game — a championship game, no less.

It’s also likely that this wasn’t the ending that Crooks, or Addy Brown, or any of the other portal-bound Cyclones envisioned for themselves when they headed to Iowa State. Crooks has been a perfect fit at Iowa State, much the same way Caitlin Clark was the perfect fit at Iowa. For both, location was a big part of their success and the locals knew it. We’ve been immensely lucky here in the land between the rivers and Crooks, the person, will be as missed in Iowa as Crooks, the basketball player, will be.

You can search for yourself to find all the comments being tossed around about Crooks, about Fennelly, about loyalty or lack thereof, about greed, about the state of college sports. You can think all those things, too.

Without having details about why the Iowa State women’s program has suddenly turned into a house of cards, mostly I just sigh and think of dreams that didn’t go as planned and a world that, in sports and beyond, seems to enjoy grabbing the things people love and squishing them like a bug.

You know what I also think of? A Hilton Coliseum that once was cold and empty with just a few hundred fans watching women’s basketball, an arena so quiet you probably could have heard what Pam Wettig or Theresa Becker were telling their team during a timeout. Once Fennelly came along, those days disappeared forever.

But it’s another new world now. And that new world came to Ames with a vengeance this spring.

Share

Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”

I’m happy to join fellow Iowa writers and journalists as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. The collaborative is more than 70 writers throughout the state - likely some familiar names to longtime Iowa readers - publishing on topics ranging from politics to food to sports and so much more. With a subscription to the IWC newsletter, readers get two weekly compilations of stories: a news roundup on Sundays, and The Flipside, a feature-filled newsletter that arrives on Wednesdays.

Meet the writers here, and see for yourself the great variety the collaborative offers.

The spirit of Pat Summitt looms large over Tennessee women’s basketball – just ask the three women who have walked the Lady Vols sideline since the legendary coach had her historic career cut short by early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

It’s been 14 years since Summitt walked away from the game she helped build, and 10 since she died at age 64. Yet she is ever present when the topic is women’s basketball, as she should be after eight national championships, 1,098 victories, an Olympic gold medal as a coach and an enduring status as an icon.

Her memory is particularly present this March Madness, with ESPN’s “Breaking Glass: The Pat Summitt Story” that debuted on Hulu earlier this week and will show again on Sunday, March 29, and Sunday, April 5. It’s not the first film about Summitt; even ESPN did another one, “Pat XO,” as part of its Nine for IX documentary series in 2013. In some ways it doesn’t tread into much new territory in terms of telling her story, but time and distance have handed “Breaking Glass” something different than the many stories that have been told about Summitt: heart.

Not that it’s ever been missing in the Pat Summitt story. Despite being known as a tough coach with an intimidating glare, fun and humor were always part of Summitt’s life, too. It was there in her 2013 memoir, “Sum It Up,” co-written with Sally Jenkins, which made clear what a crazy ride coaching and college athletics could be.

And it’s there in “Breaking Glass.” The 90-minute film is chock-full of visuals to convey Summitt’s fun side, but also the amazing world she traveled through and helped change along the way. There’s young Tricia on the farm and grown-up Pat still driving a tractor. There’s the country girl from rural Tennessee whose world opened up because of basketball. There are players and coaches at her house, having a good time. There are warm moments with her son, Tyler, that make her seem like any mom who relishes that role. Old home movies and, later, home videos bring the legend back into our lives, if only for a little while.

All of this is clearly the intent of the film, produced by Summitt’s friend, “Good Morning America” co-host Robin Roberts. Of course it’s a trip down memory lane, filled with love and friendship and while comes as a sort of anniversary, it also serves another purpose right now, intended or not.

Sure, there’s this wave of ’90s nostalgia right now, inspired in part by the Hulu series “Love Story” about JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette but also by a cultural zeitgeist in which people are increasingly wistful for days when technology didn’t rule our lives.

My ’90s nostalgia is basketball heavy, women’s basketball in particular, a time when I traveled the country covering it for the Des Moines Register, and had a press-row view of the coaches and players who are now legendary.

There’s this pervading narrative that suddenly the world has discovered women’s basketball, that it was this sleeping giant that nobody knew about until Caitlin Clark came along. To be sure, the Clark era has elevated the sport and brought more people to it but it didn’t come from nothing. If anything, this era has awoken people who didn’t notice it along the way. “Breaking Glass” provides an entertaining corrective and a useful history lesson for all the sport’s new fans. In the earlier eras there were pockets of sellouts and media coverage and the Final Four began to consistently sell out beginning in the ’90s. What’s been happening lately didn’t just appear from a magical mist; it’s an evolution, not a revolution.

In “Breaking Glass,” you can see full arenas for games in Knoxville and other places. In a current era when people complain that it’s all about UConn and South Carolina, you can watch this film and hear about Tennessee’s intense rivalry with Virginia, see clips of Old Dominion and Louisiana Tech and see a reference to a crushing loss to Iowa.

And a coach who, in that era, elevated a game she was already part of bringing to maturity. Summitt had been the Tennessee coach since taking the job at age 22 in 1974, but her teams in the 1990s won six NCAA titles (after two in the 1980s). They won three in a row, capped by a title and a 39-0 record in 1997-98. Her rosters were dotted with Hall of Fame players. The emerging rivalry with UConn was, shall we say, intense.

The knock against women’s basketball is “it’s always the same teams” (yet you never hear that as a criticism when Duke, Kansas or Kentucky show up in the men’s Final Four on a regular basis). In women’s basketball, it hasn’t always been the same teams, though Tennessee’s reign was a long one, but there have been different eras. In the NCAA era, Louisiana Tech-Old Dominion gave way to Texas-Tennessee, which gave way to Tennessee-Stanford, which gave way to Tennessee-UConn, which gave way to UConn-South Carolina, with UCLA pushing their way in, too. And, if you’re new to this women’s basketball thing, you might be surprised to see what other teams have slipped in there and won titles (Texas A&M, anybody?).

Summitt’s teams dominated for a long time, and that is no small feat. By setting the bar, the coach and her teams helped raise it for everyone else. “Breaking Glass” celebrates that for Summitt, but for a lot of others, too.

Will Tennessee ever return to its glory days? That remains to be seen. But this piece of history shows that its success, told through the story of its legendary coach, is a big part of the game’s success. And a big part of its heart.

“Breaking Glass: The Pat Summitt Story” will air on ESPN2 on Sunday, March 29, and on ESPN on Sunday, April 5. It is currently streaming on Hulu. A special, “Celebrating Pat Summitt: Live Reunion Special” will premiere at 6 p.m. CDT on Sunday, March 29, on ESPN2 and will stream on ESPN+.

Share

Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”

Buy Me a Coffee

I’m happy to join fellow Iowa writers and journalists as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. The collaborative is more than 70 writers throughout the state - likely some familiar names to longtime Iowa readers - publishing on topics ranging from politics to food to sports and so much more. With a subscription to the IWC newsletter, readers get two weekly compilations of stories: a news roundup on Sundays, and The Flipside, a feature-filled newsletter that arrives on Wednesdays.

Meet the writers here, and see for yourself the great variety the collaborative offers.

We’ve all done it. Sat in a meeting, a class or a speech that gets a little dull so we check our email or our phone. When Esha Patel did that in the middle of a chemistry lecture at the University of Iowa, she was not prepared for what she saw.

It was an email. From a major publisher. Inquiring about the rights to acquire a book the Iowa pre-med student had self-published to Amazon when she was a college freshman and had never shopped around anywhere else. But there it was, an email from an editor at Avon Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, wanting Patel’s Formula 1 racing romance novel, “Offtrack.”

“I was just sort of in shock because I hadn’t actually been querying or anything,” said Patel, a senior who will continue her studies the university’s Carver College of Medicine next year. “I was just like, ‘Oh my God, is this real?’”

Indeed, it was real. After working with Patel on some edits from her original version, Avon released “Offtrack” in fall 2024. Patel followed up with another racing book, “Overdrive,” and on Tuesday, March 24, her next book “Cross My Heart” will be released. This time the playing field is lacrosse.

“It’s been absolutely incredible the amount of people who have read this book, not just in the U.S. but around the world,” she said, adding that “Offtrack” has been translated into Spanish. “I get messages from people around the world. The reach has been incredible.”

Patel began writing romance novels while still in high school, swept up in the romance of the Bollywood films she had been watching her whole life. When she sat down one day to watch the Netflix racing documentary series “Formula 1: Drive to Survive” with her dad, one thought struck her immediately: There’s a book here.

“The vision was that this was going to be a book that centers around having a woman in Formula 1, something that a lot of people have been hotly debating, whether it’s even possible,” Patel said.

“Offtrack” caught the zeitgeist perfectly. Only five women have competed in F1, none since 1992. In 2023, just after Patel’s book was released, the Formula One Group launched the F1 academy, an all-female racing series to develop young racing talent.

By its nature, F1 is romantic. Sleek cars racing more than 200 miles per hour wind around tracks all over the world. One week Monte Carlo, the next Barcelona. Stops throughout Asia, Europe, Australia, North America and the Middle East.

“It’s very glamorous,” Patel said. “There’s just this rich people culture, for lack of a better word. It’s so interesting show how the other half lives.”

Patel’s first book features a rookie racer to the F1 circuit, Diyana Zahrani and an established superstar, Miguel de la Fuente. The two aren’t necessarily enemies but they are rivals. They aren’t particularly close until they are – this is, after all, a romance novel. While Miguel is indeed part of the story, it’s Diyana’s tale through and through.

“Overdrive,” Patel’s second book on this publishing contract, focuses on other characters on the F1 circuit who were also in “Offtrack.”

Formula 1 is what got editors’ attention, even if Patel still isn’t certain exactly how it happened. Someone saw her self-published version of the book and passed it on to someone who passed it on to someone else who passed it on to someone who had a friend at Avon and said, “You’ve got to read this.” Avon had been looking for a racing title that focused on a woman driver and “Offtrack” was just that.

It took some edits and rewrites to get it in the shape the publisher wanted, but Patel managed that while also going to class, preparing for her Medical College Admission Test and applying to medical schools. She finds time when she can sit down to write and then assigns herself daily or weekly word counts. She has, at times, asked her editor for a little extra time and she has accommodated her.

“I kind of just do all my writing in what I like to call my twilight hours,” she said. “I’ve written lot of my books exclusively after 11 p.m.”

Patel has another lacrosse romance book, “Long Hot Summer,” that will be released this summer.

Despite success as an author, Patel has no plans to veer from her original career path. Her thoughts now are to go into family medicine but she’s keeping an open mind based on what she learns and experiences in medical school. While her current time is less about writing and more about marketing the books coming out soon, she doesn’t plan to quit writing and might even work on fine-tuning that skill, too.

Inspired by other University of Iowa doctors who have done so, Patel ponders also pursuing a Master of Fine Arts to go with her medical degree. That’s not a decision for today, though, as she’s got a lot on her plate at the moment. Not that that has stopped her so far.

“Ultimately writing will become more of an outlet than it ever has been before,” she said. “But I know I don’t want to stop, that’s for sure.”

Esha Patel will discuss her new book, “Cross My Heart” at Sidekick Coffee and Books in Iowa City at 10 a.m. on Saturday, April 25 (the event moved from its originally scheduled date of March 27). She will also be part of a multi-author signing event at HEA Book Boutique in Cedar Rapids on April 17. For more information about Esha Patel’s books, visit her author page.

Related:

Share

Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”

Buy Me a Coffee

I’m happy to join fellow Iowa writers and journalists as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. The collaborative is more than 70 writers throughout the state - likely some familiar names to longtime Iowa readers - publishing on topics ranging from politics to food to sports and so much more. With a subscription to the IWC newsletter, readers get two weekly compilations of stories: a news roundup on Sundays, and The Flipside, a feature-filled newsletter that arrives on Wednesdays.

Meet the writers here, and see for yourself the great variety the collaborative offers.

Well, that’s just mean.

I suppose it’s what happens when you live in a state with the women’s basketball riches that Iowa has, but for a while on Saturday fans in the state are going to have to choose between Iowa and Iowa State or just get their thumb prepped for bouncing it around on the remote.

It’s March Madness, of course, so that kind of madness is to be expected. No. 2 seed Iowa will play No. 15 seed Fairleigh-Dickinson at 3 p.m. Saturday on ESPN while eighth-seeded Iowa State will play No. 9 Syracuse at 4:30 p.m. on ESPN2. Of course, a lot of Iowa fans don’t give a whit about what happens to Iowa State and vice versa but fans of the game and not the school will have to make do.

What’s probably even more mean is that Iowa State goes to the UConn sub-regional where the top-ranked team and overall No. 1 seed will host first- and second-round games. A Cyclone victory means playing UConn on their home floor. Oh well, somebody has to.

It’s Iowa State’s 24th appearance in the NCAA tournament and seventh in a row. Iowa, ranked No. 7 in the final regular-season AP poll is back for the 32nd time, also the seventh in a row.

Outside of what the locals are doing, though, the entire tournament gives plenty of food for thought about the women’s game.

Iowans leading the way

Earlier this year I wrote about the prevalence of Iowa-native coaches in the women’s Top 25 in one poll (and the number fluctuated throughout the year). That holds true on the brackets, too: There are six among the 68 teams playing this week.

There’s Davenport native Bill Fennelly at Iowa State and Kimballton’s Jan Jensen at Iowa. As the old TV commercials once said: But wait, there’s more.

· No. 4 Oklahoma (Jennie Baranczyk, Urbandale) vs. No. 13 Idaho, 9 p.m. Friday.

· No. 5 Maryland (Brenda Frese, Cedar Rapids) vs. No. 12 Murray State, 2 p.m. Friday.

· No. 7 Illinois (Shauna Green, Clinton) vs. No. 10 Colorado, 7:30 p.m. Saturday.

· No. 7 Georgia (Katie Abrahamson-Henderson, Cedar Rapids) vs. Arizona State-Virginia play-in game winner, 12:30 p.m. Saturday.

Forget a name, inspire a shirt

Georgia’s Abrahamson-Henderson isn’t just heading to familiar territory this weekend because her Lady Bulldogs play at Carver-Hawkeye Arena down 380 from her hometown of Cedar Rapids. She also played at Iowa, two seasons for C. Vivian Stringer (1988-90) after transferring from Georgia. And she was an assistant coach under Fennelly at Iowa State from 1994 to 2000.

Most notably in recent history, though, Georgia played at Iowa City in 2023, too, in a second-round game. The Lady Bulldogs lost to Iowa, 74-66, but that’s not why their trip to Carver-Hawkeye was notable.

In a pre-game press conference for the Iowa-Georgia matchup, Abrahamson-Henderson (sort of) named players on the Iowa roster and their strengths. When it came to a guard who wasn’t named Caitlin Clark, the coach drew a blank.

“The cute little one with the eyes, who is that?” Abrahamson-Henderson inquired about Gabbie Marshall. “Cute eyes, pretty eyes … I would consider her, besides Caitlin, a sniper.”

Snarky Des Moines shirtmaker Raygun, which already had an NIL deal with most of the Iowa players, was instantly all over that with a shirt that declared “Pretty eyes. Defender. Sniper.” Marshall probably made a little bit of money off that.

I’m not sure which of the current Hawkeyes has the prettiest eyes. No doubt they are all fixed on moving on in the tournament.

Been around the block a time or two or three

ESPN’s Rebecca Lobo made a really good point in the selection special when she said, “This feels like the last dance for players we feel we’ve watched grow up. … This is their last one, I’m going to enjoy the heck out of it.”

Lobo is correct, they have grown up in front of our eyes. Part of the reason fans can have such affinity with female college athletes is that even the superstars stick around for four years. It’s a contrast from many top players in the men’s game, who hop to the NBA in a move that would make little with the WNBA due to salaries and limited roster spots.

Certainly sticking around happens on the men’s side (Iowa’s Bennett Stirtz is a good example of a player who has emerged over his career – with three teams). But it’s a rare elite player we get to watch from freshman year to senior year and it’s been that way for decades.

Not so much with the women. This tournament will give us several players who seem like they’ve been around forever, because they have been. They’re seniors: UCLA’s Lauren Betts, LSU’s Flau’jae Johnson, UConn’s Azzi Fudd, TCU’s Olivia Miles (who transferred from Notre Dame) and Oklahoma’s Raegan Beers (who transferred from Oregon State). No doubt Big Ten foes have felt that way about Iowa’s Hannah Stuelke, too.

Even juniors like Iowa State’s Audi Crooks, Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo, Texas’ Madison Booker and LSU’s MiLaysia Fulwiley seem ancient at this point.

The future will still be bright without them: Two of the top players in the country this year, UConn’s Sarah Strong and Vanderbilt’s Mikayla Blakes, are just sophomores.

Pedigrees of success

Years ago for the women’s Final Four program, I wrote a story about coaches who played in the NCAA tournament and are now coaching in it. I spoke with Dawn Staley, who was just at Temple then and had yet to build her South Carolina juggernaut. I also spoke with LSU’s Kim Mulkey, who was then at Baylor.

That was about 20 years ago and they were just scratching the surface of their college successes. And what’s more, that’s only part of their basketball success.

Staley, who played at Virginia, and Mulkey, who played at Louisiana Tech, were the premier point guards of their eras. Staley never got a national title as a player (losing twice in the 1990 and 1991 national title games) but has managed three as the Gamecocks’ coach. A pig-tailed Mulkey helped the Lady Techsters to two national titles: the AIAW title in 1981 and the first NCAA championship in 1982; she has four as a coach – three at Baylor and one at LSU. Staley was a gold medalist in 1996, 2000 and 2004; Mulkey won a gold medal in 1984 playing for the legendary Tennessee Coach Pat Summitt, who herself was an Olympian in 1976. Staley and Mulkey are also already in the Naismith Hall of Fame.

It doesn’t stop with those two, though. Duke’s Kara Lawson was also an Olympic gold medalist as a player (2008) who had been an all-American at Tennessee and became a WNBA All-Star.

Then there’s Iowa’s Jensen, who was the national Academic Player of the Year in 1991 while leading the nation in scoring at Drake, and two members of past UConn championship teams – Vanderbilt’s Shea Ralph and Princeton’s Carla Berube.

While that kind of success isn’t unheard of in the men’s game – Duke Coach Jon Scheyer was an all-American on the Blue Devils’ 2010 national champion – it’s seems far more prevalent in the women’s game.

I bring it up not as a history dump but out of wondering if that will continue in the future. For generations of players, the only path to staying in the women’s game was to become a coach. For some, there was no pro game without going abroad; for others there was a pro game but not the opportunities to make money like there are today.

With more roster spots in the NBA, not to mention the G-League, male players have a chance to make pretty decent money hanging on a roster and further develop their games. (I have a cousin who was a journeyman NBA player. Early on, my mom thought he should just give it up, get on with his life and use his degree. “Mom,” I said, “the minimum rookie salary is $400,000. He’s doing OK.”)

The men’s and women’s games are full of hard-working, smart people who were born to be coaches even if they weren’t born to be all-American basketball players. Right now, the women’s game has an impressive collection of both.

Will it last? Time will tell. For now, we can just watch and enjoy. And get our thumbs warmed up for the remote control.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said Iowa did not make the NCAA tournament last year. The Hawkeyes did, losing to Oklahoma in the second round.

Share

Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”

Buy Me a Coffee

Share

I’m happy to join fellow Iowa writers and journalists as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. The collaborative is more than 70 writers throughout the state - likely some familiar names to longtime Iowa readers - publishing on topics ranging from politics to food to sports and so much more. With a subscription to the IWC newsletter, readers get two weekly compilations of stories: a news roundup on Sundays, and The Flipside, a feature-filled newsletter that arrives on Wednesdays.

Meet the writers here, and see for yourself the great variety the collaborative offers.

To quote Barry Manilow (and put an ear worm in your brain, sorry): Looks like we made it.

It’s state tournament time for girls’ basketball in Iowa and that means people have been wandering around Des Moines wondering when a blizzard would hit. It didn’t, but there were overnight thunderstorms and it’s supposed to rain today (Friday, March 6) with a high of around 70 degrees.

Around here, a good girls’ state tournament blizzard is one of those local legends places have, like how Drake University’s Olmsted Center was supposedly designed to look like a bulldog, the school mascot (it wasn’t). Or that the high-elevation hills around my Wisconsin hometown would protect us from tornadoes (and everyone believed that legend til the town on the other side of those hills got flattened by a tornado in 1984).

To be sure, blizzards have happened. Most famously, a big one in 1959, stranding thousands downtown and even inside Veterans Auditorium. Then it turned into a party when local DJ Frosty Mitchell tramped through the snow to his radio station, grabbed a bunch of records, tramped back to the arena and turned the scene into a giant sock hop. (The video above is an excerpt from the Iowa PBS documentary, “More Than a Game: 6-on-6 Basketball in Iowa.”)

Subscribe now

Last weekend, KCCI in Des Moines aired a report on blizzards and the girls’ state tournament and found that, to no one’s surprise, it doesn’t happen as much as legend would make it seem. According to the KCCI report, more than half of the tournaments since 1936 (50), when it was first held in Des Moines, have been snow-free. The worst, 12 inches, was in 1999. Last year saw nearly 3 inches.

But we’re not here to talk about the weather. We’re here to talk about women’s sports. And the good stories about them that pile up like chunks of snow and ice left in front of your driveway after the plows clear your street. Here are six that caught my eye.

Two Volleyball Leagues Want to Be the Next W.N.B.A. Only One Can Win.

New York Times: It’s volleyball season. No, really it is. Sure the colleges finished up in December but the pros are going strong. Maybe too strong? Knowing that women’s volleyball has been positioned as the next big thing for quite some time now, there are dueling U.S. pro leagues: League One Volleyball (LOVB, pronounced “love” the way the Irish name Niamh is pronounced “neev,” I guess) and Major League Volleyball (formerly the Pro Volleyball Federation). Their seasons began in January and will continue through April. The New York Times poses the not unreasonable question of which will survive. Indeed, it’s not unlike professional women’s basketball in the late 1990s, when two pro leagues launched to catch the sport’s wave and only one survived. This story looks at the leagues’ differing approaches and their shared ultimate goal: to be the last one standing.

Women’s College Wrestling Achieves Major Milestone with First NCAA Championships Set This Weekend

Associated Press: History is happening in Coralville this weekend, with the first NCAA women’s wrestling championships beginning today at Xtream Arena. Iowa is the two-time defending national champion, but those titles came before the NCAA sanctioned the sport. It’s all official now and teams are vying to pin down their piece of history. “It’s going to be pretty electric,” Iowa Coach Clarissa Chun said. “It was pretty cool at regionals to see them get so excited when they saw the NCAA regional trophies. They were like, ‘It’s real. It’s happening.’” McKendree, a Division II school located in Lebanon, Ill., is ranked No. 1 in the nation (all divisions are currently together in one tournament), followed by Iowa and North Central College, a Division III school in Naperville, Ill. Also this weekend, the NAIA championships are in Wichita, Kan. Two Iowa schools are contenders: No. 2 Grand View and No. 4 William Penn.

Don’t Stop Believin’: Lyndsey Fennelly’s Mental Health Journey

Iowa State Daily: We see athletes and coaches on TV or in the media, but really, we have no clue of their lives. Just like we really don’t know what anyone is going through. This story, from the Iowa State student newspaper, offers a candid and moving look at the mental health challenges that Lyndsey Fennelly has gone through and how she continues to work through them. Lyndsey is married to Cyclone women’s basketball assistant coach Billy Fennelly, but she is also a Cyclone legend in her own right. The former Lyndsey Medders played in the WNBA and is in the Cyclone Hall of Fame. She has also gone through inpatient mental health care treatment and speaks publicly about her experiences to try to lessen the stigma of mental health. “I had a lot of people tell me she was a really, really, really good basketball player,” said her father-in-law Bill Fennelly, Iowa State’s coach. “I’ve had a hell of a lot more people tell me how much they appreciate what she’s done in this journey.”

Survey Says: Why Girls Really Play Sports

Good Game: My favorite year of sports was my sophomore year in high school, when I was on the junior varsity basketball team with my best friends. By varsity time, they weren’t there for a variety of reasons – family moved away, a job, an injury. I still played but it wasn’t as fun. So it’s no surprise to me that a recent survey of young female athletes and their parents, analyzed by writer Melissa Jacobs in her Substack, has the girls listing “having fun” as their main reason for playing. Parents, on the other hand, want to the girls to play to build confidence. Here’s what’s interesting to Jacobs, though: The girls rate that pretty high, too. It’s an interesting look at what young athletes and their parents value in sports, how they align and how they differ.

Netflix’s Fascinating New Documentary Is ‘Queen’s Gambit’ Meets ‘Battle of the Sexes’

Collider: Is chess a sport? Who knows? Are women considered inferior even when the task in question does not involve physical strength? Who really has to ask? Judit Polgar of Hungary became one of the world’s top chess players at age 12, an age that would perhaps make people question her skills. But she kept getting better and eventually defeated the world’s best. As in men. But even so, she was easily dismissed and the film offers infuriating clips of the former world champion Bobby Fischer famously saying women are “terrible chess players” who “are not so smart.” Whatevs, Bobby. The film is illuminating about not just Judit’s rise, but her parents’ “experiment” to create geniuses (and then you sigh a relief that despite that, Judit and her sisters seem wonderfully normal) and the challenging geopolitics of Eastern Europe in the 1980s and early 1990s. Rory Kennedy’s film makes chess accessible, and Judit a champion worth cheering for.

NCAA women’s hockey power rankings: US star Laila Edwards strikes

The Hockey News: Having hockey withdrawal now that the Olympics are over? Curious about the sport but tired of the controversy? Well, it’s tournament time on the ice as well as the basketball court, and some Olympians are back in action with their college teams. While this story gets one basic fact wrong – it’s conference tournaments that are going on right now, not NCAAs – it does provide a who’s who of the top teams if you need a primer or just to get caught up. (For more of a college hockey primer, check out this link on The Victory Press women’s hockey site.) And as you read about Olympian Laila Edwards scoring a goal for Wisconsin in overtime last weekend to allow the Badgers to advance in their conference tournament, keep in mind that this is how Wisconsin wins: by sending you into a panic attack. The Olympics were just an extension of this; Wisconsin won its national title the same way last March – a tying goal with 18 seconds left in regulation, followed by an OT goal moments later to win the whole shebang. I’m not sure I can take that again but I’ll be watching nonetheless.

Share

Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”

Buy Me a Coffee

Share

Since Sarah Gardner Bergan opened her new bookstore in July, she’s mostly gotten unanimously positive reviews for it. But there was one complaint that took a 5-star review for Shelf Love DSM down a notch, one reader who wasn’t perfectly happy about something.

“It said there were too many sports books,” Gardner Bergan said of the two tall bookshelves dedicated to sports in her store near the Drake University campus in Des Moines.

Shelf Love DSM specializes in romance novels, creating a space where the oft-maligned genre creates community for its fans and offers a wide range of sub-genres for the stories that pretty much always have a happy ever after. Gardner Bergan doesn’t carry two shelves of sports romance to entertain herself, she carries that many because she’s running a business and those are the hot titles right now.

Romance novel readers are primarily female. And the popularity of sports romance is just another example of female and LGBTQ fans finding new, non-traditional paths to experience or share their love of sports.

“For a long time, romance itself as a genre has been very stigmatized,” said Esha Patel, a University of Iowa student who has written two Formula 1 racing romance novels and has a romance novel about lacrosse, “Cross My Heart,” coming out March 24. “And then you have women being fans of sports like hockey. There’s been a lot of stigmatization of women who enjoy sports like that, too, where people say they’re just there to watch the guys.

“So I feel like sports romance is like this fantastic way of bringing those things together.”

For Nicole Haase, a Milwaukee-based hockey writer and lifelong romance novel fan, part of the appeal is the world-building that sports romance books offer. A sports team provides a whole collection of characters whose stories can be told.

“You’re going to get a whole world with players on the same team each getting their own books and the other characters appearing in each other’s. There’s that found family comfort,” said Haase, who in high school used to tuck romance novels into her textbooks during class. “I know all these characters. I’m going to jump right in. So if you find an author you like, and you find characters you like you’re going to keep getting that over and over again, which is nice.”

Gardner Bergan’s store is building community for those who love the romance genre in general, and that fits in with those who love sports, too.

“For somebody who really enjoys sports, there can be so much misogyny in it,” Gardner Bergan said. “And I feel like romance has been a place for people to explore a love for sports and learn about those sports before going into those spaces that they might not feel as comfortable in.”

Sports teams are taking notice. On March 21, Shelf Love DSM will partner with the Iowa Wild for Hockey Romance Night. An event ticket includes a game ticket and a signing event. Among the seven authors there will be Samantha Lind, an Iowa writer who has written 24 sports romance novels about baseball and hockey. Three hundred people have already signed up for the event, said Gardner Bergan, who was an event planner before opening her store.

In January, a dance event celebrating the popular HBO gay hockey love story “Heated Rivalry,” had to be moved from Wooly’s to the much larger Val Air Ballroom, where about 1,000 people attended.

On March 13-15, the Sports Romance Convention will be in suburban Minneapolis. Gardner Bergan organized the event, which will have 57 authors on hand to sign books as well as panel discussions and trivia contests. Gardner Bergan expects around 600 people, including authors, vendors, panelists and attendees.

This week, Shelf Love DSM announced a Baseball Romance Night at an Iowa Cubs game on May 23.

Sports and romance aren’t a new concept, particularly for films. “Pat and Mike,” from 1952, starred Katharine Hepburn as a golf and tennis star and Spencer Tracy as a sports promoter (with a cameo by sports stars of the era, including the legendary Babe Didrikson Zaharias). Sparks flew with hockey and/or skating with “Ice Castles” (1978), “Champions: A Love Story” (1979) and “The Cutting Edge” (1992). “Bull Durham” (1988) made minor-league baseball seem incredibly sexy. “Love and Basketball” (2000) might be the best film ever made about the female athletic experience. In 2024, the tennis love triangle “Challengers” earned critical praise. Then in real life, Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift seemingly leapt right out of a romance novel.

But with more women participating in and working in sports, as well as more mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ characters, there are potential romance novel plots that wouldn’t have been as marketable decades ago.

The boon in sports romance is led in part by hockey, so huge it’s a sub-sub-genre within the romance genre. The immense popularity of “Heated Rivalry” didn’t spark the hockey romance craze, it illustrated it.

“It’s almost like there’s sports romance and then there’s hockey romance,” Haase said. “Hockey romance at this point is almost its own huge genre.”

“Heated Rivalry” is part of a popular “Game Changers” series by Rachel Reid, with eight books since 2018 that have sold more than 650,000 as of the end of 2025. (“Heated Rivalry,” featuring enemies to lovers Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, is the series’ second book. The first is “Game Changer,” featuring hockey star Scott Hunter and juice bar barista Kip.)

It’s a curious frenzy, as hockey is solidly No. 4 on the list of popular men’s pro sports in the U.S.

“I think hockey is appealing because there is a sort of a controlled aggression to it,” Haase said. “There’s a hyper-masculinity to it, but generally the characters are then written as big softies off the ice.”

Haase said there was one concerning aspect of the trend – race. Basketball, a very Black sport, has far fewer books; even the lesbian/sapphic sports romance books are more heavy into soccer, she said

“The whole thing is very white,” she said of hockey in particular. “There’s just no doubting that. The readers are white, the characters are white, and the authors are white, and then it just all gets perpetuated, you know?”

It’s an issue that hasn’t gone unnoticed within the genre. A session at the Sports Romance Conference will be dedicated to diversity and representation in sports romance.

A lack of familiarity with hockey is part of the appeal for writers and readers, too, Haase said. Expertise is not required.

“People don’t know it as well, that made it easy for lots of authors to hop into it,” she said.

Hockey romance is a big seller at Shelf Love DSM, and its popularity intrigues Gardner Bergan, too.

“Hockey is not the most common sport for somebody to grow up with. For me, I didn’t grow up with my dad watching hockey. I don’t associate hockey with my dad,” she said. “And I think that’s also why rugby romances are really popular. Either people love a sport so much that they’re going to read that sport specifically, or it’s just something kind of new to them that makes it interesting.”

Patel was an athlete growing up and knew nothing about Formula 1 racing until she watched Netflix’s “Drive to Survive” with her dad. Immediately she thought it would be a great idea for a book.

“Not only do you have all the high stakes and the drama and traveling the world, but the good old boys club culture was really intriguing to me,” she said.

Formula 1 hasn’t had a woman on the circuit since 1992, and that got Patel’s creativity going. The result was “Offtrack,” the story of racing and romance between rookie Dayana Zahrani and superstar Miguel de la Fuente.

Formula 1 racing is an emerging popular sport in the romance genre. Goodreads lists 189 books under a “F1 romance” search, significant number but still paling in comparison to hockey (5,865).

Those sports and more will be part of the convention in Minnesota, in its second year. Fifty-seven authors are scheduled to appear, representing the wide swath of the genre within the genre.

“It’s hard for a lot of women to find spaces when it comes to enjoying sports and enjoying romance,” Gardner Bergan said. “So having both of those things together means a lot to a lot of people”

Later this month: A conversation with University of Iowa pre-med student and sports romance author Esha Patel.

A sports romance primer

Sarah Gardner Bergan, owner of Shelf Love DSM, offers these books as a launching point into sports romance. Synopses are from Amazon listings:

“Face Off” by Chelsea Curto: Emerson (Emmy) Hartwell has waited for a spot on an NHL roster since she became a professional hockey player, and this season, she’ll finally get a chance to showcase her talents with the struggling D.C. Stars. Maverick Miller is the best player in the league, but he’s never had a winning record. Team captain and desperate to turn things around, he agrees to play nice with the fiery new left-winger even though they’re total opposites.

“High Sticking the Heart” by Marie M: Ariella Contreras doesn’t need distractions. She’s fought too hard for her independence to let tradition, family expectations, or a man derail her career. So when a tall, cowboy-hat-wearing Texan in too-tight Wranglers approaches her at a bar and begs her to be his fake date to dodge an ex? She should’ve trusted her gut and told him to get lost. Because the guy she’d never see again? Yeah, he’s Dalton Langley – the star player on the hockey team she’s been hired to be the strength and conditioning coach for. Oh, and he’s her new boss’s son.

“Long Shot” by Kennedy Ryan: Iris DuPree meets August West in a sports bar during her last semester of college. It’s the conversation of a lifetime and sends sparks flying in every direction. The connection is undeniable ... but the timing is all wrong. August is poised for the NBA draft, and Iris belongs to another man – basketball’s “golden boy” and August’s long-time rival.

“Cleat Cute” by Meryl Wilsner: Grace Henderson has been a star of the US Women’s National Team for ten years, even though she’s only 26. But when she’s sidelined with an injury, a bold new upstart, Phoebe Matthews, takes her spot. 22-year-old Phoebe is everything – and the Grace isn’t – a gregarious jokester who plays with a joy that Grace lost somewhere along the way. The last thing Grace expects is to become teammates with benefits with this class clown she sees as her rival.

“Skate It Till You Make It” by Rufaro Faith Mazarura: Ari Shumba never expected to make it to the Winter Games, let alone be the one to lead Great Britain’s women’s ice hockey team through the most important competition of their lives. … Drew Dlamini has always feared taking risks. After breaking up with his girlfriend and dropping out of college to handle a family crisis, he’s desperate for a fresh start. When he finds himself in London for the holidays, he rekindles his dream of becoming a professional photographer. When Ari and Drew meet at a New Year’s Eve party, neither of them is looking for love. … But when they unexpectedly cross paths in the snowy Swiss Alps two months later, their feelings for each other rise to the surface.

Share

Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”

Buy Me a Coffee

I’m happy to join fellow Iowa writers and journalists as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. The collaborative is more than 70 writers throughout the state - likely some familiar names to longtime Iowa readers - publishing on topics ranging from politics to food to sports and so much more. With a subscription to the IWC newsletter, readers get two weekly compilations of stories: a news roundup on Sundays, and The Flipside, a feature-filled newsletter that arrives on Wednesdays.

Meet the writers here, and see for yourself the great variety the collaborative offers.

Ah, February. A month when so many sports coalesce. So many that there was a weekend near the end of the month we used to refer to as “Black Saturday” on the Des Moines Register sports desk because seemingly every sport was going on at the same time – state wrestling tournament, regional finals for girls’ basketball, big games for Iowa, Iowa State, Drake and Northern Iowa basketball.

And every four years, we’d get Olympics on top of that too. I’m tensing up just thinking of it.

No, it was fun. It was an adventure. And we’ve got a bit of that going on again this month. Because of that, there was a plethora of stories to offer for 6-on-6, the monthly collection of six good reads on women’s sports.

Thirty-nine years ago, an astonishing number to ponder, there was even more insanity in February. On Feb. 16, 1987, after coming close a few days earlier, Lynne Lorenzen of Ventura set the all-time high school basketball scoring record, boys or girls. Even in the days before the interweb and 9 million cable and streaming channels, it was still a circus. The record still stands and likely always will, because no one piles up the points the way six-on-six girls’ basketball players did.

The two things I remember most from that time were the tiny Ventura gym — just four rows of bleachers — and the poise with which this high school girl, all of 18 years old, handled the madness. CBS News was there. Time magazine was there. The Chicago Tribune and New York Times were there. I was there, one of six people there from the Register. Truly a different time.

It’s no 1987 (my hair thanks me for that), but with this monthly collection of good reads on women’s sports, it seems only natural (unlike my hair in 1987) to offer the kind of variety that February does.

With history already made, Jessie Diggins opens her final Olympic chapter with momentum

Associated Press: The Winter Olympics officially begin today with the Opening Ceremonies in Milan-Cortina, Italy, a gorgeous backdrop to so many sports filled with their own beauty and grace. And while it’s not surprising that there’s a star athlete there from Minnesota, it’s still notable that that athlete is a cross-country (Nordic) skier. Not because our neighbors to the north don’t do that sport, it’s just that the Olympic version of it tends to be dominated by people named Bjorn, Ole, Brit or Astrid. Not Jessie — as in Jessie Diggins, entering her fourth Olympics already having a gold, silver and bronze to her name. At age 34, she’ll be retiring after these Games, and is rather looking forward to it. “I’m really excited to have a whole weekend off,” Diggins said.

At Iowa, Chit-Chat Wright fits right in

The IX: Despite her name, Iowa basketball player Chazadi “Chit-Chat” Wright lets her game do the talking, and Hawkeye fans are beginning to hear her loud and clear. The 5-4 sophomore transfer from Georgia Tech is emerging as a go-to player for Iowa, with a smooth and energetic style of play that’s a joy to watch. “She’s like a quiet, cute assassin,” said Iowa assistant coach Lasondra Barrett, who had recruited Wright to Georgia Tech. For those who don’t know, her nickname is ironic; she’s a quiet young woman. When I first heard about Chit-Chat and how she played, I wondered if she might emerge as the most fun guard to play for the Hawkeyes (at least not named Caitlin Clark) since Jolette Law, who played in 1987-91 and is now an assistant at South Carolina. That, combined with seeing that the Harlem Globetrotters are coming to Des Moines on Feb. 12, sent me down a rabbit hole about Law’s career with the Globetrotters, who she played for after college. (Because she was fun.) The State, the newspaper in Columbia, S.C., recently wrote about Law’s Globetrotter career.

‘The Miracle Season,’ a true story of Iowa high school volleyball, is now streaming

“Talk of Iowa,” Iowa Public Radio: In 2011, one of the worst things imaginable happened to a high school athletic team. The year before, the Iowa City West High School volleyball team won the state championship. Just before the next season began, the team’s star setter, Caroline Found, was killed in a moped accident. Somehow, the team and its coach found something within them to channel their grief into not just playing again but winning another state championship a few months later. It’s a story that would be unbelievable if it were a movie, but it was true and became a movie. Helen Hunt played legendary West coach Kathy Bresnahan, who spoke in 2018 with Charity Nebbe about the experience and the film when it was released. She was joined by Olivia Mekies, a friend and teammate of Caroline’s, and screenwriter David Cohen. IPR repeated the “Talk of Iowa” episode recently, after the film came to Netflix just after Christmas.

Nebraska announces addition of women’s flag football

Nebraska Athletics: On Jan. 15, the NCAA named flag football as an NCAA Emerging Sport for Women. That means the sport is on its way to have a recognized NCAA championship, which can take as long as two years. This news release from Nebraska Athletics offers a good Q&A about what the school is doing. While other schools have women’s flag football, they are mostly at the NAIA and non-scholarship Division III level (Graceland College is the only current Iowa school to offer the sport). Nebraska enters the sport as the first and only Power 4 Conference school. It’s not unlike the situation with Iowa women’s wrestling: It was the first major school to offer the sport, which means the Huskers are likely to be an immediate power. For a more in-depth, academic look at flag football, college athletics scholar (and Drake alum) Steve Dittmore looks at how and why the sport is growing for college women with his Substack, “Glory Days.”

Puck the patriarchy

dsm magazine: Kids, if they’re lucky, get to play sports so they can make and hang out with their friends. It often gets more serious than that but at their core, sports are supposed to be fun. It’s easy to lose aspect of the games, and Brianne Sanchez introduces us to women who are eagerly joining a hockey league in Des Moines, where the sport is finding a growing interest among women who want to play, some of them for the first time. “Players are picking up hockey sticks as a fun way to stay fit, make new friends, connect with family members, or claim time for themselves,” Sanchez writes. “Some also see the sport as a healthy outlet for their rage during tumultuous times.” Puck, yeah.

How women’s sports bars are resisting ICE

Out of Your League: At their core, women’s sports bars are about building community — a community built on a shared love of women’s sports, but also of people who have been marginalized for that love or for other aspects of their identities. In Minneapolis in particular, at A Bar of Their Own, that community is being tested. Sports journalist and author Frankie de la Cretaz writes about how the Minneapolis bar “is not only a safe place to land for their community, but is writing a blueprint for other women’s sports bars across the country to follow if and when ICE comes to their cities.” Owner Jillian Hiscock, who has already been using social media effectively for the bar, communicates about ABOTO being a safe space while directing people to resources they might need. The bar hands out whistles and hosts knitting sessions for those making blankets or hats for those in need. “We know that it's how we need to operate in order to stay true to ourselves,” Hiscock said, “and to the customers that we've built this community with.”

Share

Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.

Buy Me a Coffee

I’m happy to join fellow Iowa writers and journalists as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. The collaborative is more than 70 writers throughout the state - likely some familiar names to longtime Iowa readers - publishing on topics ranging from politics to food to sports and so much more. With a subscription to the IWC newsletter, readers get two weekly compilations of stories: a news roundup on Sundays, and The Flipside, a feature-filled newsletter that arrives on Wednesdays.

Meet the writers here, and see for yourself the great variety the collaborative offers.

Share

Being the first has all kinds of pressures that go with it, no matter if you were the first or there is a first you are trying to accomplish.

But for Raccoon River Wrestling’s Katie Biscoglia, what brings her joy is not so much that she was or could be the first in anything. It’s that she will not be the last.

When the girls’ state wrestling tournament begins Thursday at Xtream Arena in Coralville, Biscoglia will be going for her fourth consecutive title and an unblemished high school record in Iowa. With a title at 110 pounds, she would be the first four-time champ since girls’ wrestling was sanctioned by the Iowa Girls’ High School Athletic Union for the 2022-23 season, her freshman year. She has a 49-0 record this season.

“Every year I get asked, “How excited are you to be a four-timer, to be the first four-timer?” said Biscoglia, a senior. “I’ve had a lot of fun, but I know how hard I’ve worked the past four years.”

Biscoglia attends Van Meter High School; Racoon River Wrestling is a co-op program with athletes from Waukee, Waukee Northwest, Van Meter and Adel-De Soto-Minburn high schools. Raccoon River won its first state title last season and is in good position to win its second, with 11 wrestlers qualifying for state. Biscoglia’s father, James, is the Raccoon River coach.

Biscoglia already has one first to her name: Wrestling at 100 pounds in the 2023 state meet her freshman year, she was the first-ever champion crowned by the IGHSAU.

“It’s something that I get to share with my kids one day and always get to hold,” she said. “Even if one day it’s not as recognized as it is now, I still will know I was able to accomplish that.”

Because of girls’ wrestling’s evolution in Iowa, Biscoglia wouldn’t be the first four-time champion at the state level. The first unofficial state wrestling tournament for girls was held in Ogden in 2018, with 11 girls participating, with many girls still competing against boys at the high school level. Then it was hosted by the Iowa Wrestling Coaches and Officials Association, growing enough that it moved to Xtream Arena in Coralville for four more seasons until it became an official sanctioned IGHSAU sport.

In the time that included the unsanctioned and sanctioned state tournaments, two wrestlers won four titles: Riverside’s Molly Allen, who now wrestles for Oklahoma State’s club, and Decorah’s Naomi Simon, now at Iowa.

Biscoglia was there at the final IWCO tournament as an eighth-grader. Before the final matches, youth AAU champions were invited to hold signs displaying the wrestlers’ weights. Then they flipped them over to spell “SANCTIONED.” It was a dramatic announcement that girls’ wrestling would now be an official sport in the state and that the next year’s state meet would be under the IGSHAU banner.

It was the next, inevitable, chapter in a growing sport. In the 2020-2021 season, 561 high school girls wrestled in Iowa. This season, there are 3,692.

“It’s so cool to see a whole room of girls now, not just a couple girls in the corner of a boys’ room,” Biscoglia said.

That’s what it was like when she was starting out. Wrestling was already a big part of her family’s life; her brother, Kyle, was a three-time champion at Waukee, with James as the team’s coach, and a two-time NCAA qualifier at Northern Iowa.

“My dad would bring me to practice, and I’d sit in the corner and just play on my iPad while he coached,” she said. “That was just my daily routine in the winter.”

While in high school, Kyle went to the U.S. Olympic Training Center to work out and wrestled against some of the top women wrestlers in the country, including Sarah Hildebrandt, a 2024 Olympic gold medalist. Some of the top women in the country trained against high school boys rather than just their peers or men their own age.

“He came home and told my dad, ‘Why isn’t Katie doing this?’” she said. “So they started sending me to practice.”

She was in third or fourth grade, she can’t quite remember which, and had been in gymnastics and soccer. There were some girls already wrestling, but it was mostly boys. Two boys who were her grade school training partners are now the state’s top two wrestlers in their weight class.

“I used to be able to hang with them, but now, I mean, they’d kick my butt,” she said.

Her dad was skeptical at first.

“Honestly, I came from the crowd that thought girls that wrestled, what a weird thing, you know?” James Biscoglia said. “So it was Kyle that kind of opened my eyes to this world of wrestling. I guess I never really thought about it. So we sent her to some practices and she really, really liked it.”

Katie worked and found success. She has been a club and AAU champion at the state level and won a USA Wrestling U16 National Championship in 2024. In 2023, she was part of Team USA that traveled to Rio de Janeiro, where she won the U15 division at the ISF Gymnasiade.

It was the competition early on against boys that helped Katie, her dad said. Not knowing that she’d have a future wrestling against other girls, the work she did to make her legs a powerful weapon have paid off, he said. If she’d have kept wrestling against boys, he said, she’d have been at a disadvantage in upper-body strength and she’d need her legs more. That’s been a big key to her success.

The increased competition among girls in high school has made Katie have to up her game, she said. They didn’t all get their start in third or fourth grade like she did, but the strength of the field has definitely increased in her four years, she said.

“I’ve just really had to step it up and make sure that I’m going from being better than everyone because I’ve been doing this for twice as long to being really crisp and making sure everything is perfect,” she said.

Her record is almost perfect, depending on how you define it. Her high school record is 203-1, but it is perfect against Iowa wrestlers. Her lone defeat came in December 2024, to Sandy Breeden of Missouri in the Dan Gable Donnybrook, a premier boys’ and girls’ tournament held annually in Coralville.

“Honestly, if I hadn’t lost that match, there would be so much more pressure on me right now,” Biscoglia said. “I’m grateful for that, I learned from it. I’ve had a really good career, it’s not like it’s a red stain on it or anything.”

Breeden, along with her twin sister, Lilly, won’t be far from Biscoglia’s home turf when they compete for Simpson next year. Biscoglia said the sisters are two of her best friends and there’s no hard feelings about the loss.

“I told them that whenever they want, they can go to my house and sleep in my bed,” she said.

In college, Biscoglia will wrestle for Wartburg, currently ranked No. 8 nationally. It was a tough choice for a variety of reasons – including that she wasn’t sure if she was going to wrestle in college. All the work and pressure had taken its toll, and she thought about hanging up her wrestling shoes after high school.

“I know that sounds crazy, but I was kind of in a rough place with wrestling,” she said. “I was kind of feeling a little burnt out. When you put so much time and energy into something, there’s going to be times when you just feel like it’s a lot.”

She leaned on her friends and family through that decision, and got a huge lift from her boyfriend, Kyler Knaack, who wrestles for Northern Iowa. “He told me I was putting too much pressure on myself and that I needed to realize it was supposed to be fun, and my dad always told me that too,” she said. “He said it’s just a game.”

Once the lone girl in the wrestling room, Biscoglia now finds herself surrounded by girls of all ages. Chatting with her after a Raccoon River practice last week, the room then filled up with a couple dozen young girls, all ready to be the next Katie Biscoglia.

“These girls in here will come up and tackle me and give me hugs,” she said. “I get asked for pictures a lot, I signed someone’s arm once.”

At age 17, Biscoglia is, like many in her generation and young women a few years older, a pioneer. (“That’s what my dad always says,” she said.) Since the first time she stepped on the mat, her experiences have paralleled her sport’s history.

So if Biscoglia wins a fourth title this week, indeed she’ll be the first. But like any true pioneer, she won’t be the last. She’s just getting started – just like wrestling is for girls and women in Iowa and beyond.

Update: Katie Biscoglia did not win the title in her final match. In a huge upset, Ankeny’s Lauren Watson defeated the three-time champion. Biscoglia’s team, Raccoon River, won the Class 2-A title.

Share

Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”

Buy Me a Coffee

I’m happy to join fellow Iowa writers and journalists as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. The collaborative is more than 70 writers throughout the state - likely some familiar names to longtime Iowa readers - publishing on topics ranging from politics to food to sports and so much more. With a subscription to the IWC newsletter, readers get two weekly compilations of stories: a news roundup on Sundays, and The Flipside, a feature-filled newsletter that arrives on Wednesdays.

Meet the writers here, and see for yourself the great variety the collaborative offers.

Numbers people have a talent that is hard for word people to fathom. They can look at figures and symbols that make lesser souls want to weep and somehow, hiding in all of that, they can find a story.

Sometimes that story is a sweet church lady who is also an embezzler or some fancy double billing that cheats customers, but hey, those are pretty good stories.

By no means am I a numbers person, and yes, they can make me want to weep. But if you’re a sports fan you have to have some sense of numbers because they are part of the game. And this week, hiding in plain sight, is a heck of a story living among the numbers.

When Illinois moved into the women’s college basketball Top 25 this week, it caused me to take a closer look at the poll. And the numbers kind of in the middle really jumped out: No. 11 Iowa, No. 12 Maryland, No. 13 Oklahoma.

Sense anything interesting about that?

If not that, keep going. No. 19 Iowa State. Still nothing? What about No. 25 Illinois?

Illinois moving in at No. 25 gave the poll five teams that have an Iowa native as a coach. For the math challenged, that is 20% of the teams who have coaches who grew up in a state that has 0.95% of the U.S. population (I had to Google that second figure because I suspected I couldn’t manage the math).

A quick rundown: At No. 11 that’s Iowa, coached by Jan Jensen of Kimballton; No. 12 is Maryland’s Brenda Frese from Cedar Rapids; No. 13 is Oklahoma’s Jennie Baranczyk from Urbandale; No. 19 is Iowa State’s Bill Fennelly from Davenport; and No. 25 is Illinois’ Shauna Green from Clinton.

Crazy.

“That’s nuts,” said former Iowa Coach Lisa Bluder, from Marion.

Bluder, who graduated from Northern Iowa with a marketing degree and is probably better at math than I am, had noticed a similar pattern as she was doing research for Big Ten Network game she would be working. She realized there are four Big Ten coaches from Iowa in a conference of 18 teams (that’s 22%, and I did that math all by myself with the help of my calculator app; Mrs. Baumeister, my seventh-grade math teacher who made me stay after class for throwing paper airplanes during class, would probably appreciate that).

In addition to Iowa, Maryland and Illinois, Wisconsin’s first-year coach is Robin Pingeton, also from Cedar Rapids. Pingeton played for Bluder at St. Ambrose.

“I think it is crazy, I really do,” Bluder said. “We’re a tiny state, we’re the least populated in the Big Ten [second lowest after Nebraska] and then … how many did we just name?”

What’s also interesting is that it’s probably not the first time there have been five Iowa natives coaching in the Top 25. Creighton is having a down year but has been a poll regular for several seasons, and the Bluejays are coached by Guthrie Center native Jim Flanery. Pingeton was at Missouri before she was hired by Wisconsin last year and her Tigers teams had been ranked. Also seeing time in the Top 25 in recent years has been Georgia, coached by Cedar Rapids native Katie Abrahamson-Henderson.

That doesn’t even account for past coaches, current NAIA or Division II and III coaches or assistants at all levels (including Iowa’s Abby Stamp of Winterset and Randi Peterson of Cedar Falls), not to mention Iowa’s other Division I coaches who have taken their teams to the NCAA tournament — Drake’s Allison Pohlman of Wellsburg and Northern Iowa’s Tanya Warren of Des Moines.

“I don’t know what the explanation is,” Bluder said. “Possibly because in Iowa, we have valued women’s sports so much.”

The state’s long history in the sport is definitely a factor, Oklahoma’s Baranczyk said. She went to state tournament games as a kid, and remembers being a young fan when Iowa went to the Final Four in 1993 and Iowa State made the Elite Eight in 1999. She remembers seeing girls’ basketball players on the front page of the sports sections — including herself when she played at Dowling Catholic. She and one of her Oklahoma players, Sahara Williams of Waterloo, have described the state’s traditions and tournaments to members of the Sooners from other states.

“It’s just always been a big deal and it was always important,” she said of girls’ and women’s basketball in Iowa. “It wasn’t just something people did, it’s part of who we are.

“It matters [in Iowa] and people know it matters.”

That tradition is likely a factor. While coaching women’s basketball in the early years wasn’t a good job in terms of what it paid and the resources given, it likely had appeal in places where girls and women had already been playing. And from there, it snowballed into younger generations pursuing it as well.

“I do think it’s a little bit of culture because I feel like women’s sports are respected in the state,” Bluder said. “And I think the four Division I schools are really respected in the state. There is a culture of women excelling.

“I mean you go back to Carole Baumgarten [at Drake 1974-86] and Vivian Stringer [at Iowa 1983-95]. That’s back a ways and we had women doing really well in the college ranks.”

Even Iowa State’s Fennelly, who has been with the Cyclones since 1995, built a career solely in the women’s game and was part of an early power. He began his career as a volunteer student assistant to Bob Spencer at William Penn, an AIAW power in the 1970s and early 1980s. The Lady Statesmen won the national AIAW title in 1981.

Role models like that play a big role in choosing a coaching career, Baranczyk said.

Besides playing for Bluder at Iowa and learning the game from her dad, Terry Lillis, a former Simpson player, Baranczyk played for the legendary Bob and Sharon Hanson at Dowling. The Hansons coached together for 46 seasons and won six state titles — one at Des Moines East and five at Dowling — before retiring in 2016.

“I bet every one of [the Iowa-born coaches in the poll] had a great high school coach,” Baranczyk said.

None of this is to say women’s coaches who are natives of Iowa have a chokehold on head coaching gigs. Heck, there are three Iowans coaching men’s basketball in the Big Ten alone (including, not coincidentally, the last two Drake men’s coaches): Indiana’s Darien DeVries, from Aplington, and Iowa’s Ben McCollum, from Storm Lake, as well as Ames legend Fred Hoiberg at undefeated Nebraska. Then there’s NCAA tournament regular Creighton, coached by Greg McDermott, from Cascade.

But it’s clear that when it comes to women’s basketball poll representation, Iowa punches so far above its weight that even the math-challenged can see that it all adds up to something special.

Home, sweet home

Another quirk in the poll was seeing how many of the women’s coaches are working at their home state’s flagship schools: Jensen at Iowa, Kim Mulkey at LSU, Vic Schaefer at Texas and Kevin McGuff at Ohio State. Another four are at top school in their home state: Fennelly at Iowa State, Jeff Walz at Louisville, Krista Gerlich at Texas Tech and Robyn Fralick at Michigan State.

It sure makes it easy to recruit, said Bluder, who never had to leave her home state in her career coaching at St. Ambrose, Drake and Iowa.

“You’re from the state and you love it and you want to share it with other people,” she said. “That shines in your recruiting because there is a lot of pride that you’re from that state and you’re wearing it on your jersey.

“It’s really something.”

Share

Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”

Buy Me a Coffee

I’m happy to join fellow Iowa writers and journalists as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. The collaborative is more than 70 writers throughout the state - likely some familiar names to longtime Iowa readers - publishing on topics ranging from politics to food to sports and so much more. With a subscription to the IWC newsletter, readers get two weekly compilations of stories: a news roundup on Sundays, and The Flipside, a feature-filled newsletter that arrives on Wednesdays.

Meet the writers here, and see for yourself the great variety the collaborative offers.

Share