About me

When I was a sophomore in high school at The Bullis School in Potomac, Maryland, we had an elite bucket getter on our girls’ basketball team named Julianne Rolapp. Her hair was short, her teeth had braces, and her jump shot was pure butter. I had done some writing for our school newspaper, but somehow I got the idea to pitch a feature on Julianne to our local paper, the Montgomery County Sentinel. They told me to go for it. I interviewed Julianne as well as her coach, Jim McGuire. My story started with a horrific cliché about McGuire’s face lighting up “like a Christmas tree” upon the mention of Julianne’s name, but I got the thing published under my byline. It was a thrill.

Nearly 40 years later, it is still thrilling to see my byline under a story or book that I’ve gotten published. That remains true as I launch my newsletter on Substack.

I’m not just writing now, I’m building a new community. For those who have followed and supported my work in the past, I hope you will continue to follow and support me here. You will get the same things you’ve always gotten from me on the college basketball beat – inside reporting, analysis, opinion writing, longform storytelling. You’ll get my weekly top 25 rankings (which are always correct), game picks against the spread (which are not always correct), plus news and nuggets from all around the sport. I will pay special attention to the massive disruptions vis a vis the NIL, the transfer portal, and the rapid professionalization of college sports. I’ll continue to lean heavily into my ability to get access to people you want to hear from and write what they tell me.

But I’m also going to use this forum to delve into other topics that interest me. For example, I plan to do a good deal of writing about mental health and meditation. I keep hearing that the world is so mean and divisive, but I don’t believe that to be true. For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you know that I start each morning by posting the phrase “Please Be Kind.” It’s a reminder to myself as well as to my followers that we really do have choices as to how we want to think, feel, and treat each other. So in my own small way, I hope to use my writing ability to help people be a little less mean and a little less sad. We’re only here for a little while, after all, and we only have each other.

Mostly what I want to do is what I’ve always done – tell stories. I enjoy watching games and keeping scores, but what I love most about sports is the way it reveals our common humanity. I am incredibly lucky to have an amazing broadcasting gig with CBS Sports, but in my heart, and in my bones, I will always consider myself first and foremost a writer. After all these decades, there’s still nothing better than grinding at the keyboard and seeing what comes. It is hard work and pure joy.

So I invite you to join me as I set off on this new chapter. I’ll be soliciting your feedback as to what I should be writing about, and I look forward to the engagement. Think of this as your forum, too. I hope you will give me a little of your time, and perhaps a few of your dollars, so I can continue bringing you the kinds of stories that will entertain you, inform you, and hopefully move you to be a little more kind, to yourselves as well as others.