On April 23, USC women’s basketball coach Lindsay Gottlieb sat in the stands of an empty Galen Center for an interview with a film crew. The interview, which was going to be used for a documentary on USC star forward JuJu Watkins, took place exactly two weeks after the Trojans lost to eventual champion UConn in the Elite Eight. As Gottlieb answered a question about the day when Watkins’ season ended with an ACL tear in her right knee in the second round of the NCAA Tournament, the coach started to cry.
Gottlieb was surprised at how quickly and strongly her emotions came over her. “I realized, I hadn’t really done that,” she told Hoops HQ. “Then I saw her trainer three hours later, She’s like, ‘Man, I had to talk (to the crew) about that day, and I started crying too.’”
Gottlieb recounted the story as she sat in her office on a recent June afternoon. She did not shed any tears this time, but the experience was still raw. “Anytime a player goes down with a significant injury, it is brutal,” she said. “But I don’t remember anything like that. What we all experienced in that arena when she got hurt was just indescribable. But especially, you know, for someone you know, like Juju, it was so heartbreaking, not just for us but for basketball.”
As summer begins and the 2025-26 season approaches, Gottlieb’s job is not only to get past that moment herself, but to help her team do so as well. The Trojans’ prospects will depend on how quickly Watkins recovers, and whether she can return to the level she was playing at when she went down. The typical recovery time for an ACL surgery is 8 to 12 months, which would mean Watkins could only miss a couple of early games or the entire season. Her status will be by far the biggest question the sport will face heading into the new season, but Gottlieb is not putting any kind of timetable on it.
“We’re going to let her attack rehab,” she said. “And all decisions about her return will be based on her health, her well-being and her future, and we’ll see. It’s a unique thing because it happened at the end of last year.”
Preseason polls will have USC lower than a year ago (the Trojans were ranked No. 3 in the AP Top 25 in the preseason and never fell lower than No. 7), but there is still reason to believe the program can contend for Big Ten and national titles. Much of that is due to the arrival of yet another top-rated recruit, Jasmine “Jazzy” Davidson, a 6-foot-1 guard from Clackamas, Oregon, who is ranked by ESP’s Hoopgurlz as the No. 1 recruit in the nation. Davidson averaged 11.3 points a game, 3.8 rebounds, and a team high 2.7 steals for the U.S. at the 2024 FIBA U18 AmeriCup in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She also helped the U.S. win gold at the 2024 FIBA 3×3 U18 World Cup in Debrecen, Hungary from Aug. 26-30.
“We always felt like we had the best player in class, and it’s not a knock on anyone in any way,” Gottlieb said. “Jazzy has it all as a basketball player.”
Davidson will need to be a major contributor for USC, but the team’s leader will be 6-foot-1 sophomore guard Kennedy Smith, who ranked third on the team as a freshman in points (9.5) and minutes (29.1). Having also lost Kiki Iriafen, who is now a rookie for the Washington Mystics in the WNBA, and key reserves Avery Howell and Kayleigh Heckel, who transferred to Washington and UConn, respectively, Gottlieb set out to rebuild her roster through the transfer portal.
She picked up a couple of quality guards in Kara Dunn and Londynn Jones. A 5-foot-11 guard, Dunn was a second team All-ACC player at Georgia Tech last year after averaging 15.5 points a game while shooting just 49.3 percent from the field. Jones was All-Big Ten last season at UCLA and is known for her shooting talent. She set the single-season school record for most threes as a sophomore.
After spending all of last season at the top of the polls, Gottlieb is embracing the chance to sneak up on people again. “Maybe it’ll be more of ‘Hey, we gotta prove to people, we’re still here. We’re still really good,’” she said.
As usual, for Gottlieb, success comes down to building a culture, first and foremost. That will be a major focus for her this summer. She recently hosted a barbecue at her home to kick off summer practices and is planning to take the team back to Santa Ynez Valley for a retreat.
Gottlieb also gives her players reading assignments most every year. Her choice this year is “Legacy” by James Kerr. The book tells the story of the New Zealand All-Blacks, detailing their path to sustaining a successful culture that produced three World Cup trophies and nine semi-final appearances in the last 10 World Cup tournaments. “We have a really strong culture and a strong kind of core values, but you have to re-emphasize that every year, because there’s new people,” Gottlieb said. “You have to adapt and change and allow players and really embrace players having these opportunities that they have, but still make it about the team and what looks like winning basketball.”
During her four years at USC, Gottlieb experienced her share of winning. Her first season ended four games under .500. In 2022-23, the Trojans went 21-10 and earned their first NCAA Tournament bid since 2014. Following that was another jump to 29-6 and an Elite Eight. And in year four, USC was 29-3 going into its NCAA Tournament second-round matchup at home against Mississippi State.
That game may have taken an awful twist, but it did not lower Gottlieb’s vision for the program heading into 2025-26. If anything, with Watkins’ timetable undetermined it’s more important than ever for Gottlieb to build and sustain a strong culture. Others might be expecting less of USC next season, but Gottlieb isn’t, and she wants to make sure not only that the players feel the same way, but the fans as well.
“I think they can expect us to play really fast, have a lot of interchangeable parts and be super exciting. Be really good defensively,” Gottlieb said. “And I think they should expect us to surprise some people because our standards and our goals haven’t changed.”
