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.
