December 22, 2023
Locked On Women’s Basketball: The Next staff picks — Top stories and podcasts of 2023
By The Next
Join Jackie Powell and Isabel Rodrigues as they reflect on The Next's top stories and podcasts of the year!
On today’s episode of Locked On Women’s Basketball, host Jackie Powell is joined by contributing editor Isabel Rodrigues to reflect on The Next‘s top stories and podcast episodes of the year. As 2023 comes to a close, staff at The Next submitted their favorite stories and episodes from throughout the year and wrote about what made each story special.
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“A year is a long time. So it’s nice to like, look back at the whole thing. I mean, we put out over 1000 stories this year, which is a lot. It’s a lot of work,” Rodrigues explained. “That includes podcast episodes and features, big investigations, we’ve done smaller stories, we’ve done live reporting, we’ve done remote reporting, we’ve run the gamut of things that you can do. And so it’s nice to be able to kind of try and capture as much of it as we can, in one [page].”
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“We’ve created a lot of new projects at The Next this year that I want to make sure people know about, both so they can see them every week when they come out next year, but also to congratulate those people. Putting something together weekly is a hard thing to do and I think that deserves some extra applause. One of the great things about being an editor is that I get to cheer for people, so this is [one] way to do that,” she continued.
Powell and Rodrigues also talked about stories they contributed, including Gabriella Lewis’ culminating 2022–23 NCAA story on LSU’s national title win and Jenn Hatfield’s reporting on the Mystics’ Hall of Fame commemoration of Nikki McCray-Penson.
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“The Mystics lost this game to the Dallas Wings [where they commemorated McCray-Penson], and it’s really hard to write stories, really good stories after losses, to be quite honest, because people can be a little bit less chatty,” Powell said. “And so Jenn does a wonderful job here of painting the scene of Nikki McCray’s family being there what they were doing, watching their every move. I mean, you feel like you were in the arena reading this. And I mean, I read this and I started tearing up. It is a really moving story about a really sad thing that happened.”
They also discussed Matthew Walter’s story about Colorado’s Frida Formann and Em Adler’s deep dive on the Las Vegas Aces and how they’ve altered the modern WNBA landscape. Listen to Locked On Women’s Basketball every day to learn more about women’s basketball history, the game and its players, and much more!
