Happy June, Ball-Knowers!
I’m glad we’re able to share a new episode of Cuts & Covers with you. We had such good feedback from our episode with The Ringer’s Mirin Fader that we decided to keep the pseudo-master’s class of sports writers going! Joining the show this month is Emma Baccellieri of Sports Illustrated. If you’ve been reading feature stories on women’s basketball in the last few years there’s a pretty good chance you’ve read something of hers. Whether it’s reporting on Paige Bueckers ascent to the NCAA mountaintop at last, the new rookies supercharging the WNBA’s growth, Hannah Hidalgo’s Art of the Steal or the WNBPA’s goals at the Collective Bargaining table, Emma has established herself as one of the foremost feature writers in the sport.
On this episode, we talk about that rise in her writing, her roots in baseball reporting and the book that she’s currently working on with Jordan Robinson. I particularly appreciated Emma’s candor and interest in women’s basketball history and the incredible work that she and Jordan are doing in kicking off what appears to be a new wave of literature on the sport. Best believe we’ll be at the front of the line when it comes out (support indy bookstores!).
You can find the pod here and we’re working on getting the paywalled pods on Spotify since that’s an option offered by Substack. Let us know if you don’t see it while we work out the kinks!
Now, to the postmortem on how our May cover on Ta’Niya Latson came together…
A Poem Followed By A Story
The Cover Story: The Many Travels of Ta’Niya Latson
We’ve interview Ta’Niya a few different times as a part of our Luxury Tax series and one of the more gratifying components of repeat guests is seeing how they can get comfortable with you over time. When Greer and I chatted with her prior to the 2023 NCAA Tournament, it took a little while for her to be willing to open up and have a little bit of fun with us. By the next fall, Ta’Niya joined Tyler and I on another Luxury Tax installment and it was as if we’d known each other for years. From that interview we got a great feature on the LEGO craze among women’s basketball star but also the seed for a bigger story on her life and travels.
Klutch reached out to us around February and asked if we wanted to interview her again. The goal, it seemed, was to get her out on the media circuit to bolster a National Player of the Year case. What made things a bit easier was that we had managed to lay a foundation with her through Luxury Tax installments and thus approaching her and her team with this story concept wasn’t super out of left field. Believe me, a 30 year old white dude pitching stories about young black women’s evolving view of self is probably one hell of an ask. Even in my own newsroom, story pitches can sometimes be met with a furrowed brow and a “you really think that’s going to work?” affect. But the prior discussions we’ve had with Ta’Niya at least allowed her to trust the questions I’d be asking and where I’d be coming from so I really appreciated her (and all the athletes we work with, for that matter) for trusting me.
So you can only imagine my dismay when ESPN drops a story that is fundamentally similar to what I had been working on. Andrea Adelson wrote a great story and I highly recommend it, as it takes a more basketball-centric look at Latson and her development over the years at different stops. I hated losing that angle but still knew the essence of my piece was largely going to be unchanged. Initially, I planned to hold it until the fall but when she transferred to South Carolina it sped up the timeline quite a bit.
As I got ready to start the writing process, I had a Robert Frost poem stuck in my head. Back in high school, our chorus sang a collection of his work including a particularly nice piece of writing called Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening. There’s a multitude of themes at play but for some reason, the poem has always popped up in random places. When Anthony Bourdain went to visit Vietnam for an episode of Parts Unknown, he was treated to a rendition of it by one of the locals he was with. While I didn’t think the entire piece would thematically match, the final stanza of the poem always is in my head whenever I think of stories involving long travels or journeys…
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
There was something about the final three lines that I felt resonated and matched with Ta’Niya’s journey from state to state. She’s been everywhere, done everything and is still traveling. Still hungry for more. It was evident in her move to South Carolina and a comment she made during our interview about how she’s very used to packing up and going because that was the nature of her upbringing.
Given that Andrea had already done something that would be similar to my cover on Ta’Niya, I started to think about how I could go out and format the story differently. The concept of mirroring every portion of Ta’Niya’s travels with a unique stanza from a poem came into focus. It took awhile but there was something about Maya Angelou’s On the Pulse of Morning just seemed right. The poem is about understanding the past and its’ tribulations, being willing to have courage in ones convictions that can chart a brave new world for everyone.
Picking out pieces of the poem to match with the stage of each journey was tricky but by the end it seemed to match pretty well. If I could go back and do it differently, I would’ve liked to have had either one of her siblings or her mom involved in the story. Ta’Niya’s trainer, Coach Pitts, was absolutely spectacular and gave such a good window into her competitive nature and adherence to routine. But there’s something about the mentality and the emotional exhaustion that can come with constant moving that I think I would’ve liked another crack at.
We tried to get Dawn Staley and Raven Johnson involved with the piece too but the back end of the NCAA Tournament, the transfer portal, Finals and Staley’s impending book tour threw a wrench in things. Ultimately, the story became less about her move to South Carolina now and more about how she managed to get there in the first place.
Ultimately, I’ll always be rooting for Latson. She’s a great interview once you get past an understandable layer of defense and her play on the court speaks for itself. I’m fascinated by how it all plays out in Columbia and who knows, maybe we come back for an additional cover story if the Gamecocks start to roll come 2026.