Rebecca Lobo’s shoelace was untied.
If it were anyone else dressed in morning sweats, standing in line for mediocre coffee in a hotel lobby this month, the stray lace might have gone unnoticed. But in New York City, hours before her former team, the New York Liberty, was set to play just a few subway stops away at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, her fans couldn’t let it go.
As Lobo waited for her caffeine fix, two different people cautiously reached up to tap the 6-foot-4 Lobo on the shoulder and let her know about the shoelace. Each time, she was grateful and gracious.
“I’m like my own children — ignoring the good advice I’m getting,” she said with a smile.
Lobo’s approachability belies the fact that, in the history of women’s basketball, she is royalty. At the University of Connecticut, she was the star of the 1995 team that won the first of the program’s 11 national championships. She was part of the United States’ gold-medal-winning team at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. And Lobo, Lisa Leslie and Sheryl Swoopes were the first three players to sign with the Women’s National Basketball Association when it was founded in 1997.
Now, more than 20 years since her playing days ended, Lobo, 50, again finds herself in the middle of a pivotal moment in the sport’s history. As the top analyst for ESPN’s W.N.B.A. coverage, she will be calling perhaps the most anticipated postseason the league has ever seen.
“We’re on the ascent,” Lobo said of the sport in an interview.
The W.N.B.A., whose playoffs began over the weekend, has been one of the hottest topics in sports for months. A star-studded rookie class, led by Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, has generated unprecedented interest, shattering television ratings and game attendance records. That has also invited a wide range of commentary, from the informed to those approaching the game as though it had come out of nowhere.
What sets Lobo apart from the hot takes of social media is her depth of knowledge. It’s difficult to get more institutionally aware than someone who has been with the W.N.B.A. since its founding.
“This is the first year anybody’s really cared about the institutional part of it,” Lobo said. “This season I felt a need to be a little bit more like: Here are some facts I’m going to present you, and then you can do with them what you like.”
Basketball does not feel like work for Lobo. It is both how she unwinds and recharges. It’s been that way since she first started shooting hoops in her childhood driveway in Southwick, Mass.
“In those days I would have been characterized as a tomboy because I liked sports,” Lobo said. “Being out in my driveway, shooting, was a place that I felt a sort of belonging.”
Lobo had a rocky start at Connecticut, where she and Coach Geno Auriemma initially butted heads. Coach and player eventually reached an accord, Connecticut won the national title in 1995 and Lobo became the face of women’s basketball overnight. By her senior year, Lobo was “Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers and Angel Reese all wrapped up into one,” Auriemma said.
There was just one problem: There was no professional American league for her to play in. Lobo contemplated law school.
Then the W.N.B.A. was formed and Lobo went from being college basketball’s hottest star to the league’s poster child, a trajectory many have compared to that of Clark. Clark constantly has been compared to her fellow rookie Reese, with some of the commentary at times appearing to pit the two against each other because Clark is white and Reese is Black. In her experience, Lobo said, she never felt that tension during her own playing years.
“I truly never felt a more racially harmonious environment than a locker room,” she said. “There wasn’t any racial tensions within a locker room. Maybe that’s because I am a white woman, but I didn’t feel it from the outside, either.
“No one ever said to me, ‘You know, you’re only getting all of this attention because you’re white,’” she added. “I sometimes felt on certain teams that I was getting attention because of what I did in college and I had to prove myself going forward.”
Lobo played four seasons with the Liberty before being traded to the Houston Comets in 2002 and finishing her playing days with the Connecticut Sun as recurring knee injuries forced her body to slow down.
“Those two injuries curtailed what could have been one of the greatest careers, because of her intelligence, because of how she learns and her hard work,” said Sue Wicks, a former Liberty teammate. But Lobo channeled those same qualities into her television career, working to improve everything from her analysis to the cadence of her delivery.
By Lobo’s own admission, she was terrible at first. Television executives told her agent that Lobo needed “more energy,” she recalled.
“It felt like I had to find my way back,” Lobo said.
She slowly did, first as a sideline reporter at ESPN with critical pointers from Doris Burke, the longtime N.B.A. announcer and analyst. Still, opportunities were few and far between, given that women’s basketball was not broadcast regularly.
By the mid-2010s, the tide had begun to turn. The W.N.B.A. began to burst through the national consciousness as players leaned into social justice issues in 2020. New awareness of the league came after Brittney Griner was arrested in Russia. And then came this season.
“She’s done a really good job weaving all these emotions that have come into the game,” said Andraya Carter, a fellow ESPN analyst. “She has just been consistently steady and trustworthy.”
Lobo’s basketball season runs from mid-March, when the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament begins, through the W.N.B.A. championships in the fall. It means a lot of time away from her four children — Siobhan, 19; Maeve, 18; Thomas, 15; and Rose, 13 — and her husband, Steve Rushin.
The family used to call spring the season of “melting meats,” because Lobo would prepare food in a slow cooker early in the morning for dinner that night, then leave for the studio.
“It’s completely normal to us,” said Rushin, who met Lobo when he was a reporter for Sports Illustrated. “It’s just kind of the rhythm of our lives.”
It’s why her team of Ryan Ruocco, who is in his 11th season as a play-by-play announcer by Lobo’s side, and Holly Rowe, who has been a sideline reporter since Lobo’s playing days, is so important to her personally and professionally.
Rowe has been a particular influence. She sneaked Siobhan, Lobo’s oldest, her first lip gloss, and has taken Lobo shopping for makeup and on-air wardrobes. She also encouraged Lobo to drink coffee for the first time during a trip to Minnesota five years ago. What started as a little treat morphed into a daily routine. (Lobo’s go-to is brewed coffee with an oat milk creamer.)
The dynamic among Lobo, Rowe and Ruocco appears seamless on television, but it is the product of days of phone calls, text messages and conversations, sometimes right up to the final buzzer.
“She has an expansive brain for gathering all of these possibilities that can happen, so when it does happen, she’s all over it,” Rowe said. The most excited she ever sees Lobo is after games when she gives “little squeaks and squeals” if a team runs a play she was prepared for.
“She wants us to be good collectively,” Rowe said. “I think that takes a rare person. She’s been a famous person forever. Someone of her caliber — to want to be so good — she’s willing to say, ‘Help me.’”
Ruocco, who also calls baseball and men’s basketball games, called the instant chemistry he shared with Lobo in the booth a rarity.
“What feels different for me is I feel completely comfortable and my truest self when I’m with her,” Ruocco said. “I just feel totally at ease when I’m on air with her.”
Take the occasion of Clark’s scoring her 3,000th career point last year during her senior year at Iowa.
As soon as Lobo saw Clark touch the ball in the backcourt, she stopped her on-air analysis. Clark stepped back to take one of her signature deep 3-point shots, and as the ball swished through the hoop, Lobo gave Ruocco the space to make the call he had prepared: “History in flight.”
“Rebecca Lobo is as good an analyst as there is in sports, period,” Ruocco said. “I don’t care if you’re watching football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, baseball.”
After the Liberty game this month, Lobo slipped back into her sweats and put on her backpack. Outside Barclays Arena, she let out a yip of excitement when a Liberty fan walked by wearing her old jersey. As she waited for a car service to drive her three hours back home to Connecticut, Lobo greeted each fan who stopped her, doling out hugs and selfies.
“That was one hell of an atmosphere,” one said.
Lobo replied, “Pretty incredible, huh?”
Seeing the league break through has been “super gratifying” for Lobo and her fellow analysts, she said.
“It’s been like this hidden gem for us that we didn’t want to be hidden, and we’re trying to do as much as we can to make people more aware,” she said. “Now it’s getting the attention it deserves.”
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