NCAA Rough Notes: Multiple Ways Through 2025
12.11.24 / University of Connecticut @ the University of Notre Dame / South Bend, IN
It’s a divine Thursday evening, snuck into a week of decisive pain. The eye of our heartbreak like a whipped-up hurricane making its unstoppable landfall. I’m back in Chicago from my extended hideout in the Bay Area, unprepared for the bare cold of winter, this unimaginable ending. But tonight, I am finding a way to flee: sitting in the front seat of my friend Jodi’s car at 5pm, ready to leave. First, Jodi has to jump the car’s dead battery, which I watch her do with a little tool and no gloves. When the car starts again, Jodi ducks into the driver’s seat, her fingers motionless and momentarily frozen. We laugh about our chosen Californian way to refuse weather at all costs. And as the engine warms, the welcome sharpness of our decision to leave the city finally sets in. We are driving now, the first block of our journey to Indiana: a destination I’ve been eyeing since September. The game is a showdown between the University of Notre Dame and the University of Connecticut — a prized women’s basketball rivalry of over 30 years, one of the last games this precious left in 2024. Speeding up the expressway’s onramp is a wordless exhalation.
We drive the tollways to South Bend, an hour and a half and nearly $16 from Chicago’s grid. I’ve never been here before, but of course I’m already familiar with flashes of Fighting Irish green and gold in the city, especially at Sky games. There’s this feeling that if women’s basketball in the Midwest is an extended family, Chicago is the big house, where the cousins come for important holidays. Only now will I step across state lines, to this other home, where so many WNBA stars, like Skylar Diggins-Smith and Marina Mabrey and Jewell Loyd and Arike Ogunbowale, were raised and delivered.
The Notre Dame campus is strangely and immediately charming; it feels like it’s been preserved inside a snow globe. There are dozens of volunteers outside the arena, all wearing thick green sweaters, directing fans where to go. An 80 year-old man holding an actual wooden cane tells me where I can get my media pass. We’re late, of course, and Jodi has just graciously kicked me out of the car to park in the overflow lot half a mile away. And since I’ve managed to get credentialed for the game (is it for Rough Notes? That’s still a little unclear), I’ll be on my own now. Thanks to the guidance of the kind man in wool, I soon find the media entrance and receive both a wristband and a $15 food voucher. I wonder if this is heaven.
The press box is all the way at the top of Purcell Pavilion, but one of the main charms of Purcell is how small it is, how close the court remains even from its outer rim. And so while this is the first sold out women’s basketball game here since 2015, it’s easy to sit amongst the 9,149 fans and still experience everything with attentive focus. I’m comforted by the sea of green surrounding me, this crowd’s calming wholeness. It’s the first time in my life that I search for the definition of the word “catholic” and realize that this is exactly what it means.
It’s halfway through the first quarter and Notre Dame has an early lead when I find the last seat squeezed narrowly between two reporters on press row. We’re sitting at a super-long table, as if at a banquet: farther down, a few older journalists in little low slung glasses are taking notes on paper with ink pens. One guy has plugged in his own personal lamp. It feels like an ancient lost art, or at least something a tiny bit older than the current gloss and inconsistency of the WNBA. I love nothing more than entering a place where women’s basketball has grown before I even existed. I need this sensation, need it badly: the feeling of sneaking out of my own life to land in someone else’s. Here, in Purcell, I’m just grazing the surface of a house built by decades of other people’s lore, their triumphs and failures. I’ve become an observer of immensity, rather than the direct recipient. No matter how the outcome of this game engraves itself on the minds of thousands tonight, I relish the fact that, for me, it’s just a passing marvel.
I fall into conversation quickly with the reporter to my left; we happen to live a few blocks away from each other in Chicago. I like him as soon as he tells me that the Chicago Bulls refuse to give him press credentials anymore. Together, we laugh knowingly about the little feudal kingdoms of professional sports’ PR teams, which reminds me that one of my primary goals is still to find other misfits in the press box, and band together.
Then we Google the number of times UConn and Notre Dame have played each other since 1996. The answer is 54, of which the Huskies have won 39. Tonight, the 55th battle is before us. Part of this rivalry’s weight lies in the decades-long careers of longtime head coaches Geno Auriemma of UConn and Muffet McGraw of Notre Dame, who looks exactly the way her name sounds (Muffet is a nickname, but it’s also the only name I’ve ever heard her called). In 2020, Muffet retired, and in her place stands Niele Ivey, a former WNBA player who not-famously-enough spent her rookie season competing while pregnant (her son Jaden is now a star in the MNBA). Niele is not only an endlessly better-looking and more finely dressed coach than Muffet, but she is quite possibly a better one, too. She was actually Muffet’s point guard in 2001, the very first time the Irish beat the Huskies. Now, after just four years as head coach at Notre Dame, Niele’s teams have already beat UConn twice.
Meanwhile, Geno has kept his basic combover and signature black framed glasses, a classic and kind of square look (I mean that facially.) He is still the king in Connecticut, earlier this season becoming the winningest coach in NCAA basketball period. (He also apparently now owns an “elegant yet approachable” steakhouse in Manchester, CT called Cafe Aura.) Geno has always been fierce (though he’s softening now, genuinely amused by his young players), and remains a delightful nemesis to all Notre Dame fans. The sea of green is thrilled to boo Geno’s every move.
I remind myself to actually look at the court. It’s the second quarter now. I can see Paige Bueckers bringing up the ball, our projected #1 pick for the 2025 WNBA draft. Paige looks like a New England fire captain, directing her squad with this steely composure and, also, without a choice at all. Her team is chasing a 7-point deficit when Paige shoulders past the defense and curls the ball under, hanging in the air for a missed layup. UConn has been this way the entire first half: a little bit stumped both by Notre Dame’s defense and this unyielding Indiana rim. I’ve never really seen UConn look this lacking, actually. It’s jarring to watch these young stars struggle while wearing the clothing of my invincible childhood heroes. I hope that Paige figures out some way, at some point, to un-curse them all.
Meanwhile, Notre Dame sophomore Hannah Hidalgo is practically twirling around the UConn defense with ease. After hitting a baseline three, she looks down at her hand as though in surprise, like she’s discovering herself to be capable of magic. She has lots of bits like this: the all-talk backpedal, the two-hand binoculars, the double-fisted lion roar, the strong arms, the tongue-out camera staredown. A lot of these celebrations are sort of trending in women’s college basketball right now, but Hannah performs them with a kind of leprechaunic buoyancy. Like her small stature and stunning play is a form of magic we can’t quite catch. A basketball poetry that lies beyond explanation.
By Hannah’s own words, she is fueled completely by her faith. “Everything I do is to give glory to God,” she said after Notre Dame’s win in the NCAA Sweet Sixteen last year. According to multiple reposts and likes on social media, Hannah’s particular evangelical Christianity understands queer people to be sinners. That’s what Candance Owens called a gay journalist interviewing her, in a video that Hannah reshared over the summer, then quickly deleted. And in a different reposted video, kept as a highlight on Hannah’s Instagram, there’s a pastor from Marietta, Georgia who sounds like he’s doing terrible intercollegiate slam poetry circa 2011. He mocks non-Christian society with the lines: “Instead of mental illness, let’s call it ‘gender dysphoria’ / Instead of gender mutilation, let’s call it ‘gender transitioning’…” and the crowd goes wild: ‘it must be mental illness! It has to be gender mutilation!’ Hannah’s bold dedication to Christ, apparently the same one believed in by this cringeable Pentecostal white dude with a top knot, underlines a strain for women’s basketball’s proudly queer fanbase. Many fans shudder at Hannah’s roiling ascent to stardom because of these posts. Women’s basketball internet demands: are you with her or against her?
Discourse is stark, hardening quickly. And of course, it leaves me desperate for ambiguity. Because Hannah’s posts are wounding and fucked up, definitely, but along with social media’s decisive ruling of this is evidence of who she will always be comes a sense of loss. The soft gut of the thing. Not only Hannah’s potential to grow and change, but her current state of still-becoming, stomped out with an urgency I can’t help but find arbitrary.
People have a tendency to want to say their beliefs out loud (or have others say, in order to like or repost) as a way of casting out doubt. But there are also ways of feeling, and becoming, that might occur separately from this, and that begin without language. These are the ideas and their potential that we undeniably embody. To me, in so many ways, Hannah is a person who embodies queerness. She has that leprauchonic basketball magic, that speed/stomp/yell/clap that defies gender, after all. She often wears that sort of cryptically gay Gen-Z style: cargo pants and trucker hats and loose jeans held up by shoelaces instead of a belt; she does Tik Tok dances alongside teammates whose own expressions of gender range across a spectrum of feminine to masculine; and there’s this basic fact about her: that she’s 19, and has only just begun her women’s basketball career on a national level. Women’s basketball, as I regularly thank my own agnostic higher power, is a sport that not only increasingly celebrates (and sells) queerness, but remains unsettled by it. Here is a terrain where players, coaches, and fans continue to test the perceived limit(s), both on and off the court, where subversion is baked into the very foundation of our sport. All of this is to say that to me, Hannah Hidalgo has the potential to be multiple things: both at once, or perhaps separately in contradiction, I’m not sure..
As I’ve continued to read about Hannah Hidalgo, I’ve also learned a few things about her past: she arrives in Indiana as a product of a “Christian household” in New Jersey, her father Orlando’s finest prodigy. Orlando served as the head coach of Hannah’s high school team at St. Paul IV Catholic High School. These days, Hannah apparently still calls her parents to pray before every game. According to one article, one of her favorite bible verses is “Be angry and sin not.” How might Hannah open herself up (or perhaps be forced to make room for) some questioning of what “anger” and “sin” mean, through being a women’s basketball player? How will this ecosystem, unlike the closed ranks of anti-queerness and transphobia, light her path, her own discovery? As one kind stranger at a bar asked me: “Are there any anti-gay stars in the WNBA?” to which I googled “best WNBA players” and found a list of mostly gay dads (Stewie, AT, JJ, etc.) Just kidding. What I mean to say is that I can’t really imagine a world in which Hannah Hidalgo joins the WNBA without getting ‘set straight,’ so to speak, by the gay-ass family of elite players she’ll come to rely on.
On this Thursday night in South Bend, Notre Dame continues to have the upper hand on UConn throughout the entire game. They are led by Hannah Hidalgo and her backcourt partner Olivia Miles (who my friend Molly and I swear came out via Instagram during the summer of 2022, which we remember because that’s when the Chicago Sky hosted All-Star Weekend, and Olivia arrived holding hands with her then-girlfriend, and once, we saw them from afar, freshly excited for their relationship, and we swooned.) In the second half, I flicker in and out of Purcell Pavilion’s magnetism. The halftime introduction of those former Notre Dame stars, Jewell and Marina and Arike and Skylar, all awkwardly clustered at half court, strikes in me a fear of the Chicago I’ll return to. I try to remain here, with these very certain balms: the balm of talking to a stranger that you might have things in common with. The balm of a welcoming basketball arena, like a candle glowing through the darkness of Midwest winter. I feel intoxicated by it all, something I’ve not been able to access for a while.
Then I get too comfortable, perhaps, and find myself ‘back on my bullshit’ as they say. After hearing that the reporter to my left is the daughter of a famous male basketball reporter, I decide to chat with her. She tells me she’s already writing for a national platform as a Junior at a Big Ten school. “Who did you root for growing up?” I ask. “I couldn’t root for anyone because my dad was a journalist,” she replies. “Oh,” I say knowingly. “So he was really into, like, objectivity?” She seems to think this should be a given. “Yeah…” she says. I ask: “Have you ever, like, confronted him about his notions of objectivity?” And she looks incredibly confused. And then we stop talking after that.
In the fourth quarter, there’s a small window for UConn to tighten the game, the final chance for a lurching down-to-the-wire thriller that our media row so longs for. But the Irish keep hitting threes, like a car speeding, widening the lead. Each one is beautiful and arching before our eyes. If I were a child in South Bend, these shots might become my singular memory of the game: the ball soaring overhead as though joining the sky itself.
After the final buzzer and Notre Dame’s undeniable victory, I find Jodi outside. She says she loved the experience and would go anywhere for dinner with me, the kind of willing, platonic kindness that nearly makes me blush. We head to a 24 hour diner where I eat more than I’ve been able to in weeks: BLT and pancakes and onion rings thick with fried batter. Jodi asks strange and satisfying questions. But I can sense this evening of small relief will be over by morning. I know that most likely, tomorrow holds “the end” of a love that could not fully begin (not yet, or not ever, the searing question remains), even though it is one of the truest feelings I’ve ever had. This doesn’t make sense to me. Or rather, this new confusion makes me doubt whether I make any sense to myself.
In the days that follow, I slam into a terrifying new form of writer’s block. I am filled with anxiety about the difference between thoughts you can identify, and the words that live inside of you like shadows, the feeling of waking up to a nightmare just passed. In this state, I am frantic to assign language to meaning, but each time I return to the sentences I’ve written, I find something broken and flawed. I delete everything. I swing between acceptance and refusal. I am stupid for trying to write at all, I tell myself. Why am I full of such misguided insistence? At times I feel shockingly unsafe with myself. The taunting of clarity failed, toppled now, undone; the greatest indicator of wrongness, spiraled beyond words, embodied now. Tell me: how have you managed to crawl away from yourself when you can’t be trusted any longer?
I spend the next few weeks trying to hit once again on my strength of discernment, a more confident grasp. A basic belief in my goodneess. My mother and my friends tell me: “The only way is forward. The only way is through.” And so instead of writing, I start planning. The only way is through: I’ll drive to the East Coast and visit all of the people I’ve known and perhaps once loved! The only way through: to write, finally and painfully, while sitting in an empty bar with the loudest overhead music I can find. A longtime Serbian-owned spot in Chicago that has a new Ecuadorian chef, where they serve pollo asado and ají with red onion cut up into tiny pieces. Or a strange room of a bar in Brooklyn, salty chicken wings next to me like a companion. The only way is through: the struggle to write is limitless, it is lifelong, it can stretch itself around reverence, too. The only way is through: beauty exists beyond anything I’ve already known.
The only way through. This is also why I spend much of December working on a new goal: to re-design Rough Notes and relaunch in 2025. This is the last post before Rough Notes becomes a project that asks you, dear reader, to consider paying for these posts (I think they’re essays?) Consider whether $1 per essay is worth it to you: to continue getting immersed in contrarian bursts of “women’s basketball was cooler when it wasn’t!” and in detailed descriptions of the WNBA’s current spectacle, and in the moments you’re like, “am I just reading this girl’s diary?” and in the deep dives of the characters who built our sport in the first place. I hope you’ll come along with me.
And I hope that in the spirit of Rough Notes, we can find some room in our hearts to consider contradictions as a space of potential. “Please afford me this uncertainty and real life mystery,” someone once asked of me. I am facing that mystery now. And maybe, together, we can open up that sense of mystery young players like Hannah Hidalgo, who are still becoming. We can ask ourselves: what are the multiple things we hold, as we enter this new year? It can feel very, very scary to exist in such transition. (I am the number one person in need of learning from patience.) But I wonder whether we can soften our hearts, if cosmic trust is cultivated by vulnerability, dictated not necessarily by a God, but by the people we come to know. It’s beautiful that this can happen through the wide expanse of women’s basketball: not only a sport, but a way of getting somewhere. Not only a single rivalry game shining bright on a December night in the middle of Indiana, but a process: a way that allows us to arrive again and again, anew. This year, I’ll do my best to trust in that.
"I’ve become an observer of immensity" take me out already, mgs!!!! so. damn. good.
I will subscribe 😀