Posted by Graham Hays
"Welcome to the first edition of the Catamount Student Roundtable. We're your hosts. I'm Heather Swayne, a rising junior shooting guard for the women's basketball team. Joining me is Jessica Jackson. So go ahead, Jessica, and tell the listeners a little more about yourself."
So began the first podcast from Western Carolina basketball players Heather Swayne and Jessica Jackson this summer. The brainchild of director of media relations Denise Gideon (herself a maestro of multimedia), the podcast regularly turns Swayne and Jackson loose with athletes and coaches from across the school's sporting spectrum.
At least, the guests usually come from within the athletic community at the Cullowhee, N.C. school. With a road date Tuesday looming against the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Swayne and Jackson recently had an opportunity to do some unusual scouting. In one of their recent podcasts, available for free download on iTunes this past Friday, Swayne and Jackson got a chance to grill Pat Summitt for nearly 30 minutes (it doesn't hurt to have contacts like former Lady Vols legend Kellie [Jolly] Harper, the head coach at Western).
For one lifelong Tennessee fan -- at least before becoming a Catamount -- and one of two aspiring coaches asking questions, it was what you might call a "good get."
"I'm pretty sure my jaw dropped to the ground," Swayne said of learning about the interview. "And I was like, 'I'm just going to let you know, I'm probably not going to talk for the first five minutes, because I'm just going to be shell-shocked.' "
Swayne pulled through just fine in the end, and in fact, it was her question about what she and her co-host could do to help prepare them for their own coaching careers that wedged itself most prominently in Jackson's mind after the conversation.
"She told us to just take notes on everything Kellie says," Jackson said. "If she says something in practice you like, go write it down. She said 'Make sure you keep all the scouting reports.' Kellie is constantly borrowing plays from other teams, just seeing something you like.
And [Summitt] just said that comes in handy, having the notebook you can look back on for every game, because one day, obviously, the goal is for us to be head coaches. So now we can take things that we've learned from Kellie, who learned from Pat."
Swayne and Jackson will enter Thompson-Boling Arena as the opposition Tuesday (not that being part of the media necessarily disqualifies one from being the opposition for some coaches, although Summit can't be faulted on that count). But that doesn't necessarily mean they will pass up an opportunity to ask a follow-up question and let Summitt put some faces to the names -- you know, in case she's ever hiring.
"That would be pretty neat if we got to speak to her in person, just let her know who she was talking to on the other side of the phone," Swayne said. "But whether that comes or not, it will just be an awesome experience to get to walk into that arena and play."
As for the podcasts, those will keep rolling along throughout the season. It doesn't take a big-time guest to get the attention of the Western Carolina campus, where athletes lobby and cajole the hosts to get their time on the microphone. Swayne and Jackson, friends and roommates off the court and off mike, admit they needed a little time to transfer their natural banter to the studio, but with 18 podcasts under their belt, they're ready to give Ira Glass a run for his money.
"We've gotten so much more comfortable with it," Jackson said. "We have our base set of notes -- we actually do prepare for them. We make notes and we get facts about different teams and stuff like that. If you could hear our first one and the one we did maybe a week ago, you'd be like, 'Wow, those aren't the same girls.' "
And with Summitt already in the books, who tops their wish list for guests?
"Let me think," Jackson pondered as she thought hard. "I guess you can go with another legend in the women's game in Geno Auriemma. He's a hard-nosed coach. You have the NC State coach, Kay Yow. You have the Rutgers coach, Vivian Stringer. There's a lot of great coaches that, I could use their advice as a young player."
So there you have it. Geno, if you're out there, you've got an open invite.
Women's Basketball
