A courtside interview with Paige Bueckers scrolled into view, and I thought: Hey, I should watch this. Because, I thought, I’ve never heard Bueckers talk to the media, and I wonder where she is in relation to Caitlin Clark.
Remember, if not for injured knees, Bueckers had the inside track on the position held by Clark. But Clark reached senior year and rookie stardom first, and with that comes hundreds of additional sessions with the media.
So I stopped the scroll, unmuted the phone for this interview, and expected Bueckers to be far behind Clark in terms of media savvy.
Bueckers got the question: What does it mean to you to be the fastest scorer of 2000 points at UConn. A softball, and Bueckers raked it. It means everything, she said, but it takes a village. Good answer: She knows it’s an impressive record to break, but everyone made assists.
Bueckers is still a student-athlete. Clark is at a different level, in Taylor Swift’s company with billions of dollars involved. She’s breaking old constraints on, and introducing many people to, professional women’s basketball.
With the world watching, I think Caitlin Clark has maintained her universal appeal. Her superpower seems to be that people who show her ill will tend to look like villains.
You know which coach has gone next level at media relations: Lynne Roberts, whose first name I use more often in print lately. She’s at a professional level where her media contact is with like professionals, so I try to look like one. I call her Couch on the phone.
Roberts has said she’s in a later phase of her career, and opted to compete in the WNBA because (as it was for Sir Hillary) it was there. She developed a professional media presence while Utah reached contender status, and she addressed national media increasingly often.
Some coaches never rise above a level where their press conferences look like chores, when they’d rather be on the bus going back to work.
Other coaches sound like they know dealing with media is important. World audiences include viewers as casual as bar patrons and channel surfers, whose sole impression of a sports organization is based on coaching soundbites.