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    Dawn Staley Is More Than a Basketball Coach for Her Players

    For the veteran women’s coach at the college and Olympic levels, honesty and discipline are central to leadership.This article is part of our Women and Leadership special report that coincides with global events in March celebrating the accomplishments of women. This conversation has been edited and condensed.As coach of the University of South Carolina women’s top-ranked basketball team, Dawn Staley is a dynamic leader at a time of surging global popularity in women’s sports. At 53, she is a Hall of Fame point guard who guided the United States to three Olympic gold medals as a player and one as a coach. And in her 16th year at South Carolina, Coach Staley just led the team to its second straight undefeated regular season. Now she seeks her third national collegiate title. A proud Philadelphia native, Coach Staley is an outspoken advocate for gender and racial equity in sports and beyond.Her secret to guiding young people today? Honesty and discipline, lessons she learned from her mother.You make statements with your coaching wardrobe, and a hoodie you recently wore declared, “Everyone watches women’s sports.” What’s different now?I just feel like there’s more access to our game. There’s more demand. I think it’s OK to tell the stories of our game and people in our game. I hope it’s not a fad. I don’t think it is. Because the fabric of our game is strong. It’s bursting at the seams right now on all levels, not just collegiately, but the W.N.B.A., even high school. Younger girls have grown up on the W.N.B.A., and during my time in college, we didn’t have that. We’ll get a big bump when the Olympics roll around.For the first time, there’s going to be the same number of female athletes as male athletes at the Olympics. Are you amazed it took that long?No. I’m not. I think we have been held back, intentionally, and the numbers and the demand today prove that.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How to Sit Courtside at Madison Square Garden

    Close to the action at a Knicks game, a writer gets some advice from Kenan Thompson of “Saturday Night Live.”Madison Square Garden went very quiet when my face appeared on the giant screen above center court. The silence was noticeable. A few seconds earlier, Kenan Thompson’s face had brought down the house.It wasn’t like anyone gasped or got angry — no one seemed taken aback. It was just that no one knew who the hell I was. And why should they? I’m not famous. I had no right to be up there in the first place.Still, it was hard not to take it personally. Eighteen thousand people — New Yorkers, no less — had decided to silence their cheers. Eighteen thousand people had agreed, as one, to reject me.The chyron below my face on the GardenVision screen read: “Actor.” That hurt, because I no longer think of myself as just an actor. It also hurt because the subhead read: “‘The Wolf of Snow Hollow.’” Solid movie — I mean no disrespect — but it’s just that I die within the first three minutes.At 4:45 p.m. that day, my manager, Harry, sent me a text: “Is boyfriend still here?”I thought he wanted to hang out with us, which I didn’t feel like doing, so I considered lying. I let my typing bubbles go … and I let them go away. Harry texted again: “I have two extra courtside tickets to the Knicks game.” Honesty is the way, etc.I’ve done my fair share of sitting courtside. I know that sitting courtside is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I can’t think of a more annoying fact, but I’ll come clean: I’ve sat courtside upward of 30 times. What can I say? I’m a good guest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Annie Hamilton’s Courtside Adventure at Madison Square Garden

    For a fleeting moment, she was the queen of Madison Square Garden.Madison Square Garden went very quiet when my face appeared on the giant screen above center court. The silence was noticeable. A few seconds earlier, Kenan Thompson’s face had brought down the house.It wasn’t like anyone gasped or got angry — no one seemed taken aback. It was just that no one knew who the hell I was. And why should they? I’m not famous. I had no right to be up there in the first place.Still, it was hard not to take it personally. Eighteen thousand people — New Yorkers, no less — had decided to silence their cheers. Eighteen thousand people had agreed, as one, to reject me.The chyron below my face on the GardenVision screen read: “Actor.” That hurt, because I no longer think of myself as just an actor. It also hurt because the subhead read: “‘The Wolf of Snow Hollow.’” Solid movie — I mean no disrespect — but it’s just that I die within the first three minutes.At 4:45 p.m. that day, my manager, Harry, sent me a text: “Is boyfriend still here?”I thought he wanted to hang out with us, which I didn’t feel like doing, so I considered lying. I let my typing bubbles go … and I let them go away. Harry texted again: “I have two extra courtside tickets to the Knicks game.” Honesty is the way, etc.I’ve done my fair share of sitting courtside. I know that sitting courtside is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I can’t think of a more annoying fact, but I’ll come clean: I’ve sat courtside upward of 30 times. What can I say? I’m a good guest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Lefty Driesell, Basketball Coach Who Put Maryland on the Map, Dies at 92

    He built Maryland into a national powerhouse and became the first coach to win more than 100 games at each of four major college programs.Lefty Driesell, the Hall of Fame coach who built nationally prominent basketball teams at the University of Maryland in the 1970s, and who at his retirement in 2003 was the nation’s fourth-winningest N.C.A.A. Division I men’s coach, died on Saturday at his home in Virginia Beach. He was 92.His death was announced by the university.Driesell (pronounced drih-ZELL) was the first coach to win more than 100 games at each of four major college programs. Over five decades, his teams won a total of 786 games.He coached at Maryland from 1969 until October 1986, posting a 348-159 overall record in College Park. His Terps reached eight N.C.A.A. postseason tournaments, won the 1972 National Invitation Tournament championship and captured an Atlantic Coast Conference tournament championship in 1984. They finished high in The Associated Press’s national college basketball rankings of the early 1970s.He was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2018.Driesell was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 2018.Maddie Meyer/Getty ImagesAcross Davidson, Maryland, James Madison and Georgia State, Driesell had an overall record of 786-394. He coached James Madison to four consecutive appearances in the N.I.T. and led the team to the N.C.A.A. national tournament in 1994.He closed out his coaching career at Georgia State, where he was head coach from 1997 to 2003. He led the team to a huge upset of Wisconsin in the opening round of the 2001 N.C.A.A. tournament.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Dartmouth Players Are Employees Who Can Unionize, U.S. Official Says

    A regional director for the National Labor Relations Board cleared the way for the collegiate men’s basketball team to hold a vote.A federal official said Monday that members of the Dartmouth men’s basketball team were university employees, clearing a path for the team to take a vote that could make it the first unionized college sports program in the country.In a statement, the National Labor Relations Board’s regional director in Boston, Laura Sacks, said that because Dartmouth had “the right to control the work” of the team and because the team did that work “in exchange for compensation” like equipment and game tickets, the players were employees under the National Labor Relations Act.A date for the election on whether to unionize has not yet been set, and the result would need to be certified by the N.L.R.B. The university and the N.C.A.A. are expected to appeal the director’s decision.In September, all 15 players on the team’s varsity roster signed and filed a petition to the labor board to unionize with the Service Employees International Union. On Oct. 5, Dartmouth’s lawyers responded by arguing that the players did not have the right to collectively bargain because, as members of the Ivy League, they received no athletic scholarships and because the program lost money each year.The N.C.A.A. and its member schools have long resisted unionization attempts by college athletes, defending the student-athlete model that has come under fire by labor activists, judges and elected officials over the years.In 2014, the Northwestern football team led the highest-profile attempt by a college program to unionize, arguing that because the players were compensated through scholarships, they had the right to bargain collectively.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    N.C.A.A. Investigates Booster Club Funding for College Sports

    The University of Tennessee’s football program is under investigation for recruiting violations involving a donor collective, signaling an effort to rein in the role of outside money in college sports.The N.C.A.A. is investigating the University of Tennessee’s football program for recruiting violations involving a group of outside donors, signaling an escalation of efforts to rein in the growing influence of money flooding into college sports, according to documents and people familiar with the case.The investigation is focused on Tennessee’s high-profile donor collective, a group of alumni and wealthy boosters who support the team by channeling payments and other benefits to players. The inquiry is looking at, among other things, the group’s role in flying a high-profile recruit to campus on a private jet while the football team was wooing him, one person familiar with the case said.Having the booster group pay for the trip by the recruit, Nico Iamaleava, now Tennessee’s starting quarterback, would be a violation of N.C.A.A. rules. The inquiry comes after the N.C.A.A. penalized Tennessee for earlier recruiting violations and signals the organization’s growing concern about the huge sums being injected into the nominally amateur world of college sports by donor collectives.The case could have profound implications for the direction of high-profile programs across the country, especially in football, where outside money raised and disbursed to players by collectives has reshaped the economics of the game. News of the investigation into Tennessee’s athletic program was first reported by Sports Illustrated.Officials at Tennessee are concerned that the investigation could result in a devastating blow to its football program, according to a person briefed on the matter. The program is already on probation for the earlier recruiting violations, and school officials are worried about the potential for the N.C.A.A. to take drastic action, like banning the team from postseason play and disqualifying players.Facing that possibility, the school has hired several law firms and is considering a range of legal options to stave off any consequences.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    My Rick Pitino Story

    A basketball coach’s persistence has a newly retired journalist reminiscing about newsgathering in a different era.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Of all the gym joints in all the towns in all the world, he walks into mine.That’s how I felt last spring, when I learned that Rick Pitino had become the head basketball coach at St. John’s University in Queens, N.Y., which happens to be my alma mater. The mere thought of Mr. Pitino, 70 years old and still strolling the sidelines as I watch basketball at home, newly retired, took me back to the most bizarre moment of my 38-year career at The New York Times.I’m referring to the first time Mr. Pitino and I crossed paths, in May of 1989, under the most unusual circumstances: at the beginning of a new day (2:30 a.m.) and the end of a long, winding driveway. A colleague and I could see Mr. Pitino through a large bay window. Clad in a bright red sweater, he was chatting on the phone, sitting on a sofa in what appeared to be his living room. The sound of car doors slamming behind us was enough to make Mr. Pitino whip his head around and rush out his front door to confront us.“Who the hell are you? What the hell are you doing here?” I remember him asking.To be honest, we were sort of wondering the same thing ourselves. Several hours earlier, I had just finished a long clerical shift in the Sports department at The Times when Bill Brink, the weekend editor, summoned me and a colleague to his desk.It was late, and Bill told us he had just been on the phone with Sam Goldaper, our venerable basketball writer, who told him that Mr. Pitino, then the head coach of the New York Knicks, was about to resign and return to his first love, college basketball. It was rumored that Mr. Pitino had accepted a job offer from the fabled University of Kentucky, where he had always felt that the blue grass was greener.Sam didn’t have Mr. Pitino’s phone number, but had given the Sports desk the address of Mr. Pitino’s home in Mount Kisco, N.Y., in the upper reaches of the Westchester County suburbs. Neither of us had a vehicle, so Bill wrote out a transportation slip, which allowed us to use one of the cars The Times then kept for reporters in the parking lot next door.Before we left, Bill told us to try and get a quote from Mr. Pitino. Even if he wasn’t home, the reader would still know that The Times had tried to contact him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Herbert Kohl, Former Wisconsin Senator and Milwaukee Bucks Owner, Dies at 88

    A member of the family that founded Kohl’s department stores, he guarded federal budgets as a U.S. senator while spending lavishly to revive the N.B.A. team he owned.Herbert H. Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat who kept watch over federal budgets in four terms as a United States senator, but as the die-hard owner of the National Basketball Association’s often mediocre Milwaukee Bucks spent lavishly to keep the team afloat in his hometown, died on Wednesday afternoon at his home in Milwaukee. He was 88. His death, after a brief illness, was announced by the Herb Kohl Foundation, his nonprofit organization.By his own account, Milwaukee meant everything to Mr. Kohl. His parents had immigrated to the city from Poland and Russia early in the 20th century, and his father, Maxwell Kohl, had opened a corner grocery store there in 1927. Herbert and his three siblings were born and raised in the city, scions of a family that in one generation had built an empire of Kohl’s stores across the Upper Midwest.In Wisconsin and surrounding states, the Kohl name became almost as familiar as Schlitz, which called itself “the beer that made Milwaukee famous.” By 1972, when the British American Tobacco Company bought a controlling interest in Kohl’s, the company, still managed by the Kohl family, had 50 grocery stores, six department stores and several networks of pharmacies and liquor stores.In 2012, under new owners, Kohl’s became the largest department store chain in the United States, surpassing J.C. Penney, its biggest competitor.Herbert Kohl was president of the Kohl Corporation from 1970 to 1979, when British American Tobacco bought the remaining corporate interest. He then left management, a tycoon in search of new challenges. He found two: the Milwaukee Bucks, which he bought in 1985 for $18 million and owned for 29 years of mostly losing seasons; and a seat in the Senate, which he held from 1989 to 2013, and where he became a popular advocate of working families, small-business owners and the elderly.His political experience had been limited. He had been chairman of Wisconsin’s Democratic Party from 1975 to 1977, but he had never held office. The 1988 Democratic primary election to succeed a retiring William Proxmire, who had fought wasteful government spending for 32 years in the Senate, centered on two major issues: campaign expenditures and name recognition.Mr. Proxmire had boasted for years that his last re-election campaign, in 1982, had cost him just $145.10. Mr. Kohl acknowledged that he had spent more than $2 million in the 1988 primaries alone, mostly on television ads, but argued that it was nearly all of his own money and that, as a senator, he would not be beholden to special interests.Wisconsin voters knew the Kohl name from his family business and his Bucks’ ownership. But his primary opponents were well known, too: former Gov. Anthony Earl and Wisconsin’s secretary of state, Doug La Follette, a shirttail relative of Robert M. La Follette, the former governor, senator and presidential candidate. Mr. Kohl won the primary and easily beat a Republican in the general election.Kohl greeting soldiers before a Milwaukee Bucks game in 2012.Gary Dineen/NBAE, via Getty ImagesWith assets of $265 million, he was Milwaukee’s wealthiest resident and one of the Senate’s richest members. What colleagues found in Mr. Kohl, however, was a friendly, unassuming and modest man, something akin to what the country’s founders might have imagined in the Senate: a person of stature and accomplishment with a sense of obligation to the citizenry.He believed that government, like a family, ought to live within its means, and he supported a constitutional amendment to require Congress to pass balanced budgets. It was never adopted. But he tracked deficits that soared for most of his tenure, and voted consistently to restrain spending.Early in his Senate years, Mr. Kohl stopped taking money from special interest groups. “I think I was the only person in Washington that didn’t solicit money,” he told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2016. “I stopped taking money from people because it detracted from my ability to do my job well. We need a system that gets the ugly money out of it.”Senator Kohl strongly supported public education and educational savings accounts. On social issues, he favored abortion rights and affirmative action programs, and he voted to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. He also supported environmental protections.He opposed legislation to authorize the Persian Gulf war in 1990, but in 2002 he voted to endorse military force against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. He often joined more liberal Democrats in trying to cut military spending. At times, his voter-approval ratings were as high as 73 percent, and he won re-election campaigns in 1994, 2000 and 2006. All of them were largely financed with his own money.During his final term, Mr. Kohl supported President Barack Obama’s health care reforms, voted for the Affordable Care Act in 2009 and received high ratings from groups that sought universal health care. He voted to expand Medicare and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which became a federal program that provided matching funds to states.When Mr. Kohl announced that he would not seek a fifth term in 2012, President Obama said: “America’s children will grow up in a better place thanks to his advocacy of childhood nutrition programs, a strengthened food safety system, access to affordable health care and child care and juvenile crime prevention.”Herbert H. Kohl was born on Feb. 7, 1935, the third of four children of Maxwell and Mary (Hiken) Kohl. Herbert and his siblings, Sidney, Dolores and Allen, attended public schools in Milwaukee. At Washington High School, Herbert was an excellent student and played football, basketball and baseball.He and another a boy from the neighborhood, Allan Selig, who was known as Bud, became roommates and fraternity brothers at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where Mr. Kohl earned a bachelor’s degree in 1956. They remained friends as Mr. Selig went on to become the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team and the commissioner of Major League Baseball.After receiving a master’s degree in business from Harvard in 1958, Mr. Kohl invested in real estate and the stock market for some years, and then created Kohl Investments to handle his assets. He and his brother also helped manage the Kohl Corporation in the 1970s until the completion of the company’s sale to British American Tobacco.Kohl talking to the media in 2005.Gary Dineen/NBAE, via Getty ImagesThe chance to rescue the Bucks arose in 1985 when it became known that Jim Fitzgerald, the team’s largest single shareholder, was ill and that he and other investors wanted to sell. The Bucks, which were created as an expansion team in 1968, had won an N.B.A. championship in 1971 and had been a regular playoff contender over the years, and yet they were playing in the smallest arena in the league.As fears spread that new, deep-pocketed owners might move the Bucks to another city, Mr. Kohl bought the team for $18 million in March 1985. He spent millions more on contracts for players, coaches and other personnel, as well as on team travel, promotions and arena maintenance. Still, in the 1990s, the Bucks were mired in mediocrity. Even reaching the conference finals in 2000 seemed only a temporary respite from the gloom. In 2013-14, the Bucks won only 15 games. It was the worst record in team history.In April 2014, Mr. Kohl sold the Bucks to two New York hedge-fund billionaires, Marc Lasry and Wesley Edens, for $550 million. At Mr. Kohl’s insistence, the team remained in Milwaukee. The new owners and Mr. Kohl put up a total of $200 million for a new arena, the Fiserv Forum, which was completed in 2018.Mr. Kohl also gave bonuses, totaling $10 million, to every member of the Bucks organization and every worker at the BMO Harris Bradley Center, the Bucks’ aging and soon-to-be-replaced arena. Ushers received $2,000 each, and some longtime Bucks employees got enough to pay off mortgages or buy new homes.“I was happy to do it, and they were deeply appreciative,” he told The Journal Sentinel. “It doesn’t change my life, but it changes theirs.”Mr. Kohl, a lifelong Milwaukee resident who kept a horse ranch in Jackson, Wyo., never married and had no children. He is survived by his older brother Sidney, his older sister Dolores and his younger brother Allen.He gave $25 million to the University of Wisconsin for construction of the Kohl Center, a 15,000-seat basketball and hockey field house built on the university’s Madison campus in 1998. He also founded an educational foundation that each year provides grants to graduating seniors and teachers in Wisconsin high schools.Mr. Kohl’s net worth was never disclosed, although in 2016 Forbes estimated that it was between $630 million and $1.5 billion. He remained a loyal Bucks fan, with season tickets at the Fiserv Forum, a few rows up from courtside.As if vindicating Mr. Kohl’s faith in the team, the Bucks ended decades of drought by winning the N.B.A. championship in 2021, defeating the Phoenix Suns in seven games. Mr. Kohl was presented with a championship ring for his efforts to keep the team in Milwaukee, and he rode in the lead car in the championship parade, proclaiming: “This is one of the big days of my life.”Orlando Mayorquin More