Cheryl Miller did something last summer that she had never done before: She bought USC women’s basketball season tickets.
Miller, of course, is the best player in the history of the program, if not the history of the game. She led the Trojans to glory in the 1980s and served as head coach in the ’90s. Yet she couldn’t remember when she’d last caught a USC game before this season. It had been at least 10 years, she figured, maybe 15. She hadn’t bothered even for the crosstown rivalry games with UCLA. The program no longer engaged much with its alumnae, Miller says. But they hadn’t missed too much.
The Trojans had one of the most storied histories in the game; USC was among the first schools to give Division I basketball scholarships to women in the 1970s and won two of the first three NCAA women’s championships with Miller in the ’80s. The biggest stars in the sport had been the Women of Troy. Yet that legacy had more recently given way to an extended, desultory period of frustration. Forget contending for championships. It had been more than a decade and a half without so much as an NCAA tournament win for the Trojans.
But that environment began to shift over the last few years. When USC hired former Cal head coach Lindsay Gottlieb to lead the program in 2021, she extended an open invitation to former players, welcoming them back to campus. Come to practice any time. Talk to the team. Help connect them to program history. Miller was happy to do that. As this season drew nearer, however, she realized that she wanted more. Miller was going to come back to Trojans games, she decided. Not just occasionally, but as often as possible, as close as she could get. For the first time in her life, Miller bought USC season tickets, picking out four courtside seats, and she prepared to bear witness. She needed to be front and center for this.
Miller wanted to watch JuJu Watkins.
The 6' 2" freshman guard had been the top recruit in the country, boasting a rare combination of skill, size and speed. Judea Watkins had been recruited by all the best college programs in the country. But she turned her focus elsewhere. The Los Angeles native decided she did not want to join a perennial contender. Instead, she wanted to restore a legacy in her hometown. Watkins became the first Gatorade National Girls Basketball Player of the Year to choose USC since Lisa Leslie in 1990. And Watkins began delivering on the hype immediately.
Watkins scored 32 points in her college debut. (That it was a statement win over No. 7 Ohio State made it all the better.) This kind of performance from her soon felt routine. USC’s record for 30-point games in a freshman season had been three. Watkins passed that … in November. That included a Thanksgiving tournament in the Bahamas, where late in the fourth quarter, the Trojans found themselves down by six against Penn State. No problem: Watkins quickly engineered a seven-point run. In a minute and a half, she had a pair of layups, two rebounds and a transition three that felt “straight out of the NBA,” Gottlieb says. The game, which was held in a tiny gym, was not televised, and the contrast between context and performance felt staggering. Watkins had simply bent the score to her will. It was just the fifth game of her college career. This was part of the program’s best start in a generation. After being largely absent from the rankings for years, USC climbed back into the top 20, and then into the top 10. By the end of December, the Trojans had reached No. 5, their highest mark since Miller had been on the sideline coaching Leslie.
Watkins had done in a few weeks something no one else had been able to do in her lifetime. She’d returned USC women’s basketball to national relevance. Her teammates call it “The JuJu Effect”: sold-out gyms, autograph seekers and picture takers, an entirely different environment from just a year ago. It seemed as if there had been no hesitation, no recalibration, no adjustment period at all, really. There was only Before JuJu and After.
Miller was taking it all in from her courtside seats. Beyond her historic playing career, she coached in both college and the WNBA, in addition to spending years as a broadcast analyst. What comparison does she have for a freshman who’s this dominant a two-way player so early in her career? Miller takes a moment, running through a mental catalog of luminaries, and finds just one. Another daughter of California who drew astonished crowds at USC.
“There’s one other person who really stands out,” Miller says, finally, “and that would be me.”