Happy Thursday, Ball-Knowers!

We’ve got another treat for you today. After a couple weeks of everyone saying “Let’s get back to talking about the basketball!”, we listened and hit the road. There will be more episodes of Summer School to come, but we begin at Kentucky to learn from Kenny Brooks why Clara Strack is a potential top three pick in next year’s WNBA Draft.

All our usual newsletter accoutrements are here for you, with some extra content for the Ball-Knowers that power our on-the-ground reporting. If you want to support us in that endeavor, feel free to click the button below and get a free seven day trial to our paywalled content!

Happy reading!

Catch the condensed segment here:

Los Angeles Sparks (12-20) vs. New York Liberty (20-14): 8:00 PM ET, Prime Video

I know what you’re thinking. Mystics vs. Aces is on tonight, why is that not the marquee matchup? It’s the biggest of the night, to be sure. But I’m not sure it’s more compelling than the Liberty trying to dig out of the 8 seed. Right now, they and a listing Dallas Wings team are firmly in the playoffs but that’s only by virtue of every outside challenger falling apart on the other side of the All-Star break. What makes this last stretch interesting isn’t who gets into the playoffs, it’s what kind of matchup do they want in the first round? Additionally, I need to see something out of this Liberty team late. They’ve had a relatively easy schedule post All-Star but the heat turns up a lot come the 22nd. You have to win the easy ones now.

When I think about transgender people in sports, I think about my friends by Julia Poe, Chicago Tribune

Rough Notes: The final season courtside by Maya Goldberg-Safir, Rough Notes

For Geno Auriemma, questions about UConn had one answer - 'Just ask Carl' by Mike Anthony, CT Insider (Our condolences go out to the Adamec family as well. For those that don’t know, Carl Adamec was a longtime UConn beat reporter that passed away this week at 68. This is a lovely column about the legacy he leaves on our women’s basketball world).

by Andrew Haubner

Last February, I was covering Vanderbilt vs. Kentucky in Nashville. Mikayla Blakes was on a historic scoring run and both teams were ranked in the AP Top 16 at the time. The Commodores won 81-79 on a late bucket from freshman Aubrey Galvan and a defensive stop on the other end. Wildcats head coach Kenny Brooks entered the postgame press conference and proclaimed that Clara Strack, his junior center, was the best center in the country.

I’ve thought about that claim for the last few months and as we got closer to the 2026-2027 NCAA women’s basketball season, I figured there was no time like the present to interrogate it a bit. So I hopped in the car and drove up to Lexington to meet with Brooks and have him break down the tape on why Strack might have a case to be the top pick of the 2027 WNBA Draft…

Kentucky has always had a complex dynamic with women’s basketball. While Big Blue Nation is widely considered to be a hoop fans paradise, the lion’s share of investment, opportunity and attention goes to the men’s program. The Wildcats’ 2026 Sweet Sixteen was the first trip the women’s team had made in a decade. Which is part of why, when Brooks was hired, he was adamant that a condition of his arrival would be more resources be put into Kentucky WBB.

“The [WNBA] is getting more notoriety ; women's college basketball, more notoriety. And we feel like we we can do the same thing here at the University of Kentucky,” he told me. “That's why I came here. I came here because when you think of the word ‘Kentucky’, it’s synonymous with basketball, and I felt like this was a sleeping giant.”