Welcome to Good Game with Sarah Spain, where we're wondering if the greatest love story Never told should have actually been you know, never told, Rip benefit Jafleck see you for.
Around three in a couple of years.
On today's show, we'll take you behind the scenes of the upcoming E sixty volleyball doc No Place Like Nebraska, with director and producer Jen Carson Strauss, plus a slew of NWSL and WNBA games to keep an eye on this weekend, a super weird flex from producer Alex and we answer a great question from one of you little slices.
It's all coming up right after this.
Welcome back, my little Laune slices.
Here's what you need to know today.
The NWSL made a big announcement on Thursday, a historic new CBA extending the current deal through twenty thirty with some major new benefits for the players.
Here's a couple of the highlights.
One, the college Draft and much despised Expansion Draft both are gone. Instead, players will now have autonomy to decide which team is the best fit and negotiate with teams individually. Two free agency for all players used to have to play multiple seasons before earning the right to become free agents. Now all players will be free agents as soon as their current contract expires.
Three.
No more trades without player consent beginning next year. Just earlier this week, we told you about that Seattle Louisville trade that resulted in Bethany Balser and Jalen Howell needing to uproot their lives, both players expressing surprise over the news. Will starting with next season, teams will no longer be
able to make trades unless a player approves it. There's way more to it than that, from increases in minimum salaries to revenue sharing, So stay tuned for a deep dive next week with the folks who made the deal happen. That's going to be great meantime on the pitch. After a lengthy Olympic break, NWSL regular season games resume this weekend. Here are a couple to watch for tonight at seven pm Eastern on Prime Video Houston Dash versus Orlando Pride The Pride or A eleven five and Oh can they
keep that success alive post Olympic break. Then Saturday, two thirty pm Eastern on CBS New York, New Jersey, Gotham FC versus Portland Thorns. Eight gold medal winning players from the Paris Olympics are expected to take the field in this matchup between two top five teams in the NWSL.
This is a must watch.
San Diego Wave versus Angel CITYFC also Saturday, that at four thirty pm Eastern on CBS our first look at Landon Donovan as head coach of the Wave in a regular season game, and two teams tied with fifteen points battling for the final playoff spot. Finally, Washington Spirit versus KC Current Sunday at twelve eastern on CBS sports Net, number three and number two in the standings facing off
in a blockbuster in DC on the Links. The LPGA AIG Women's Open began yesterday in Airshire, Scotland, with a massive amount of money on the line for the winner one point.
Four to two five million dollars.
You heard that right, That's the highest amount in the AIG Women's Open's forty eight year Historying Coughlin, the American who won the Scottish Open last week and has won two of her last three starts. She's in the field of players looking to keep up her momentum, so as Paris twenty twenty four gold medalist Lydia Coe to hoops. On Wednesday night, Tina Charles became the second all time leading scorer in WNBA history. She's now at seven four
hundred and ninety one points. Charles had twelve points, seventeen rebounds, and the Dreams win over the Mercury to pass Hall of Famer Tina Thompson on the list. On the opposite side of the court that night, the woman who still leads the league, Diana Tarassi, by quite a margin too. Dt sits at ten five hundred points and she's adding
to her total every game. Charles spoke of her admiration for fellow Yukon Husky Tarassi quote, just to hear my name in the same sentence as Diana is just unimaginable. What she has meant to me personally and this league.
Her impact.
She's definitely the goat, and I'm just thankful. It was very cool to watch the two embrace and then compete on Wednesday. There's plenty of WNBA action on tap this weekend. We got some more matchups you should look for. First up, got the Las Vegas Aces at the Minnesota Lynks tonight at nine thirty Eastern. That's on Ion and League Pass. These teams squared off on Wednesday and Vegas Minnesota pulled
away with a ninety eight eighty seven road win. Courtney Williams was given the Aces nightmares with her mid range jumper and her near triple double, and Ace's head coach Becky Hammond was not pleased with her team defense in that one.
Can they adjust tonight?
Moving on, we got the New York Liberty hosting the Connecticut Suns Saturday, seven pm Eastern on League Pass. Their number one and number two respectively in the league standings, and New York has a three and a half game cushion. Both teams are playing well, but Connecticut has struggled on the road a bit this season. Will their road woes
continue in that one? Saturday at eight pm Eastern onn League Pass, we got Indiana Fever at the Minnesota Lynks, and one of the greatest players in WNBA history will be honored during the game. The Links are going to retire Maya Moore's number twenty three jersey at Target Center. She'll be the fifth player in Link's history to have her number retired, joining Lindsay Waylan, Rebecca Brunson, Simone Augustus,
and Sylvia Fowls. It's super poetic that Caitlin Clark and the Fever are going to be in the arena for this one because Clark grew up idolizing Maya Moore. This is a perfect time for a little mini yes and moment. Yes and Yes, Caitlin Clark is incredible and helps draw enormous crowds and attention to the WNBA. Yes, she is one of the best rookies this league has ever seen,
and Maya Moore is simply her the blueprint. She helped lead Minnesota to a championship her very first year in the league and one Rookie of the Year, and then proceeded to win three more rings League MVP Finals MVP. Oh and by the way, she helped exonerate her now husband, who is incarcerated for more than two decades on a wrongful conviction.
I mean, what can't she do? I could list stuff all day.
So Yes, let's keep celebrating the amazing performance Kitlyn is putting together. And let's remember she's not the first rookie phenom this league has ever seen. Yes, and while we're talking, WNBA pretty cool. The Sky sent few players to the DNC in Chicago this week. Team owner Michael Alter coordinated passes for Elizabeth Williams, Brianna Turner, and MICHAELA.
Oyanwere to attend.
They saw speeches from Barack and Michelle Obama, they saw the official confirmation of a black woman as the Democratic presidential nominee, and they were moved by the experience. Oyanwere told the Chicago Tribunes Julia Poe quote, it meant everything. I'm not an emotional person like at all, but just to see the emotions from different people, from people who look like me, it's just so important seeing somebody who is in that light do what you can do as well.
I can't even put it into words. It's so powerful, so inspiring. It's just everything for young black girls and boys.
End quote.
All right, sliceas mark your calendars because this Sunday at five pm Eastern, ESPN is airing a new E sixty that goes behind the scenes of Nebraska Volleyball. It's titled No Place Like Nebraska, and it covers the team over the last year, beginning with a historic volleyball Day in Nebraska in August of last year when record breaking ninety two thousand and three fans crammed into Huscar Stadium to
watch Nebraska defeat Omaha three sets to none. Yeah, if you didn't see it, it was ninety two thousand people in a football stadium to watch a volleyball game. But the doc isn't just about that game or just about volleyball in particular. It shines a light on outside hitter Harper Murray, the heartbreaking death of her father when she was just a child, and her desire to find her own success wearing his number.
While Murray had.
One of the best ever freshman seasons in Nebraska volleyball history, last year, she had a turbulent spring, including being charged with driving under the influence following an April traffic stop.
She was sentenced to nine months of probation in July, but she will be allowed to play this fall.
We caught up with one of the co directors and producers of the film, Jen Carson Strauss, to learn more about how the film came to be, why she decided to cover Nebraska, and why she decided to focus a bit on Murray's story. It's all coming up right after this break, joining us now former Pepperdine soccer player turned
documentary director and producer for E sixty on ESPN. She's a diehard football fan, but she missed the twenty twenty three Super Bowl, and Baby Number two decided to arrive just in time to keep her from watching the epic Chiefs Eagles battle. And that's why I stick with dogs. It's Jen Carson strauss ten. Thanks for joining us.
What an amazing intro. Sara Spain, Thank you so much for having me on. So good to see you.
Always something to remember Baby number two by the Super Bowl.
Baby.
Your new doc No Place Like Nebraska, which documents the journey of the twenty twenty three Nebraska women's volleyball team, premieres August twenty fifth, five pm on ESPN and ESPN Plus.
I was lucky enough to get a screener, so I'll try not to give anything away while also enticing people to watch it because it's really good, and I have to admit as much of a women's sports fan as I am, I don't know that I would see it and just be like, oh, sure, I'm into this, and I'm so glad that I watch it, and I want everybody else to give it a shot. And I'm curious why Nebraska volleyball, what made you decide to follow them for that season?
Yeah, sir, sorry.
Co directed this with Mattie run at ESPN, and I was looking into some other women's sports stories and at the time volleyball Day was had come on to her radar, and so I give her credit. She was the one that was like, Hey, this massive event is going to be happening. And I think for everybody else in America, our stay in you know where we're at in Connecticut. This was a shock that, you know, ninety plus thousand fans were going to be at a volleyball game in
the middle of the country. And so I think that's kind of where the jumping off point was.
Was, Hey, this is this is insane.
How can we peel back how this came to be and why is it that way?
Yeah, and I've been hearing about Nebraska volleyball from AFAR for years, and that ninety thousand plus person game really put it all on our radar. And seeing people in the farthest reaches of a football stadium where they couldn't even barely see that there was a volleyball not to
mention a game going on really opened my eyes. And then this story he told me, the legacy that footage from the nineteen seventies, a coach that's twenty plus years at the helm handing on to another coach that's twenty plus years at the helm. There is so much history there of how you build something like this, and it's particularly interesting in women's sports, how it seems to often happen in places that aren't dominated by a ton of
pro men's teams that pull all the focus. This feels like the whole state of Nebraska gets behind this team, right.
I mean that's one of the things.
I mean, up until this last year in Nebraska has no professional sports teams, no professional football, no professional basketball, and that's in men and women's and so.
The Cornhuskers are their professional team.
I mean when I have been there to film and I'm in the ubers like they're listening to the radio to you know, hear what's happening with their sports teams. I mean people that went to the university, but people that didn't go to the university, farmers, girls, men, women, people of all ages and types, and so we really got an authentic taste of like this touches the entire state and everybody is so invested in the coren Oskers.
It's a cool story too, of a team that's very young, that's had a ton of success, but maybe had some doubts coming into the twenty twenty three season because there were no seniors, a couple freshmen and a transfer that we're going to play big roles. How did you gain
the trust of young players with tough stories. I'm thinking particularly of Harper Murray, whose father passed away when she was very young, who carries his legacy, wears his number from when he was in the NFL, and it's a very hard story for anyone to talk about a tragedy like that.
But you got her and.
Her mom, and she's so young and so new, she was just getting into the college game. How did you convince her to go public and to talk about something so difficult?
I mean, as you know, Sarah, trust is so important, especially when you know we don't give editorial control to our subjects. We don't let them see it beforehand, we don't pay them to be involved in these documentaries, So you really do have to establish that trust. And so one thing that we did was we had you know, zoom meetings with Harper early before we even met her,
to really get to know her as a person. Not hey, this is what we need out of you, but just get to know her and meet her where she was and introduce ourselves and tell her, you know, what we were looking to do with the story, but just taking a really.
Natural interest in her.
We were honest about the fact that we wanted to know about her family and about her backstory and why she wears number twenty seven. I mean, that was something that people knew, but she hadn't really ever talked about it before.
And so.
When we sat down, though, was when really the layers like started to come and she was really open and raw and honestly Sarah like is one of the interviews I think that I've like, it felt.
Like there were no cameras there.
I don't know if Pember would say that too, but it got to that point where it was just the two of us talking. She tested me afterwards, and like a therapy session, just because it got to that point of things that you know, even her mom and her teammates and her coach haven't seen that side of Harper, and so I think it was a really therapeutic experience for her, and that first one allowed her to really have that trust with us that carried on even to you know, post filming.
She's one of those women's athletes that you picture if they're in a big market or on a men's team, with all the same factors, they would be a massive star. I mean, she just feels like a natural star, not just for her explosive play, her dynamic. You know how fun she is to watch. She's gorgeous, she's got an interesting story, but she's also flawed and complicated and has so much simmering under the surface that you can see in her that makes her all the more interesting to
want to follow and watch. And then, of course, so twist happens when that season that you covered is over. You told me that you intended to keep covering the team through a spring game. They always pick a small town in Nebraska to play a game in, which is so cool and so smart. Like when I heard the coach saying that they've been doing it for years and years, it felt like such a no brainer to drop into somewhere and create a whole new fan base of young people and families that are excited to.
Watch Nebraska volleyball.
But how different was the story you came in hoping to tell from the story that you ended up telling, not just because of the twist involving Harper Murray, which everyone will see or maybe have already heard about in the news, but just overall. Was it what you thought you were going to find when you got there?
No?
I mean, honestly, I think what this started as for me was like, Okay, this is a new type of storytelling for me, I hadn't done really a follow type of documentary before where we were going to get as much access as we were going to get, and with players that most America doesn't really know. And so I
started off with maybe some low expectations. And I think it was after we did those interviews that I remember walking away being like, holy crap, and I'm not going to tell anybody about this because I want to.
I want to just press play.
Internally when we screen it front everybody, because I felt like and Maddie and the co director, we felt like, you know, we had something really special with people who, as you know, like this this wasn't just about volleyball, and this isn't just about a record breaking game.
It's about the pressure and expectations that.
Come with one plane for the University of Nebraska and that fan base. But also I mean, these you have to remind yourself, these are nineteen twenty year old kids, and social media is insane now in NIL and all the things that go into the things that affect their mindntal health that wasn't even a thing five years ago.
And so that part was really interesting.
For us and we wanted to really dive deeper into that.
Yeah, it becomes a big part of the story.
I really encourage everyone to watch at premieres August twenty fifth, five pm on ESPN and ESPN Plus. No place like Nebraska, even if you're not into volleyball or Nebraska, which I loved seeing the shots of and the storytelling around even the place in which it all happens. I really recommend watching it. I wanted to ask, as you were researching and doing the background for this, we have a segment on our show called Yes And where we say, yes, this is awesome and did you know that twenty years
ago this happened or this athlete did this? Helping to kind of create mythology and history around women's sports. In ways we haven't before. There was a game in nineteen seventy one. Did you read about this in Mexico? One hundred and twelve five hundred spectators for a women's soccer tournament. The attendance figure isn't exactly official. It was not tracked as Did.
You see that at all?
Did anyone think about that in dealing with the ambiguity around this sort of Nebraska record of the most to attend to women's sports event.
We did see it, and I think, you know, I think because it was unofficial, we felt confident enough and everybody else SA said it too, so we're like, okay, we're not you know, we felt like we were in an okay place. I think the other thing that was just interesting, Sarah, is that like this was the only this is the only game within the things that we're talking about that is not soccer. I mean, the was a soccer game, Barcelona was. It's a soccer game, and so I think that was.
One of the interesting parts. I mean, you talked about it. You can't even see the volleyball court on this field.
You're not supposed to play volleyball outside, you know, unless it's beach volleyball, So there were all these other interesting layers to it that made it interesting from our perspective beyond just the crowd.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean both incredible numbers, and that's why we love a little yes, and because it's worthy of talking about both of them. This is such a great documentary. Congrats on the excellent work. I look forward to everyone seeing it and getting to talk about it, and particularly being able to reflect on all the great storytelling you did before everything went down with Harper Murray. That will really help people put into perspective some of the stuff she's going through.
So thanks for giving us some time.
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
We got to take another break when we come back.
Producer Alex has been keeping something from us.
Welcome back Slices.
It's time for the debut of a news segment we like to call weird flex. But okay, in this inaugural edition, we got to put producer Alex on the hot seat weird flex al, But why didn't you.
Tell us you're pro hockey player? Wait what?
There's a story about the women's pro hockey leagues that existed before the current PWHL was formed. On a blog that shall remain nameless, but would probably be well served by checking their names before they hit published, because when discussing the PHF, it reads, in part quote, while it seemed as though everything was growing and chugging along smoothly, there were things attempting to derail it. Some professional players
opposed the idea and voice their displeasure. Among those players was alex Asie or Hillary Knight, who won the inaugural league championship with the Boston Pride but never returned Alex. It even links to one of your tweets, so it's the alex Azzi they're thinking of.
You got some splaining to do, Honestly, of that excerpt that you just read, the most egregious thing in that is that the PHF was chugging along smoothly because it was not yit. There were some major salary cuts. Players were not getting any health insurance. So you know, honestly, maybe I was a former player and I just never got paid.
Adds up, maybe you got paid as much as the actual players did. My favorite part is, just like the top two pl worthy of mention are you and Hillary Knight.
The legendary Hillary.
Knight based on Zoom and my impressions of you also no offense, but I feel like your ass would get tossed in the PWHL or the PHF. You do not seem like you could take a.
Hit, Sarah.
Maybe you don't know this about me, but I played ice hockey growing up.
I should have guessed that on your field hockey background. You just look slim. You look like a lean, mean fighting machine who Hillary Knight would check it to next week one hundred.
That is accurate. There is a difference between playing hockey and being good at it, and I am definitely in the former category.
Honestly, weird flex But okayl.
We love that you're listening, but we want you to get in the game every day too.
So here's our good game play of the day.
Watch Jen's awesome documentary No Place Like Nebraska. It premieres on Sunday five pm Eastern e sixty on ESPN, and we'll be streaming afterward on ESPN Plus. It's the end of the week, y'all, which means it's time for around and find Out Friday. Today, we've got a WNBA player perilously on the edge of finding out. Anne, self proclaimed slice Alyssa Obradovitch set us up perfectly to tell the tale because Alyssa asked me on social do technical fouls
in the w carry into the postseason? First, thanks for the question, Slice, I'm guessing you're asking because rookie phenom Caitlin Clark is this close to having to sit out a game due to technical fouls.
Yep.
She picked up her fifth of the season, and the fevers went over the storm on Sunday when she punched the padding of the stanchion behind the bucket.
She was frustrated. After the game, she told.
Reporters that the referee at her outburst was quote disrespectful to the game of basketball, and that she'd also gotten a similar call in college when she was frustrated with herself and her play. Whether or not you quibble with the call. With twelve games to go, she's got five technicals. That's two away from the all important number seven, which results in an automatic one game penalty. Another suspension is issued for every two technicals beyond number seven. Well, so
number nine, eleven, thirteen, you get it. So she gotta be careful because if she keeps picking around, she's going to find out The good news for Clark and for the fever. Technical fouls do reset after the regular season, so Clark and the rest of the players in the w get a clean slate when the postseason starts. Thanks
for asking that question, Alyssa. I actually wasn't one hundred percent sure on that one, so I asked friend of the show, Annie Costable, who covers the WNBA for the Chicago Sun Times, and she hit me back, So give her a follow at Annie Costable, got a question about the rules of a league, got a question about postseason format, the best recipe for panzanella salad, whatever it is, send.
It our way. Remember there are no dumb questions.
Hit us up on email, good game at wondermedianetwork dot com or leave us a voicemail eight seven two two oh four fifty seventy.
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production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. You can find us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Production by Wonder Media Network, our producers are Alex Azzi and Misha Jones. Our executive producers are Christina Everett, Jesse Katz, Jenny Kaplan.
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Our editors are Jenny Kaplan, Emily Rudder, Brittany Martinez, and Grace Lynch. Production assistants from Lucy Jones and I'm Your Host Sarah Spain