In a nod to its four West Coast newcomers, the Big Ten will hold its men’s and women’s basketball tournaments in Las Vegas one time each in the next four years, the league office announced Wednesday.

The news comes eight days after Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti announced that Indianapolis’ Lucas Oil Stadium will remain as host of the Big Ten football championship game through 2028.

Las Vegas’ T-Mobile Arena will host the 2027 women’s and the 2028 men’s basketball tournament. The Pac-12, the former home of new Big Ten members USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington, staged its men’s basketball tournament at T-Mobile Arena from 2017 to 2024; its women’s tournament had been held at other Las Vegas venues since 2019.

Other men’s basketball tournament future sites includes Indianapolis’ Gainbridge Fieldhouse in 2025 and ’27 and Chicago’s United Center in ’26. Gainbridge Fieldhouse also will stage the ’25 and ’26 women’s basketball tournaments, while Detroit’s Little Caesars Arena will host for the first time during the 2028 tournament.

“I’ve been really pleased in the interest from cities across, not just from the football side, but men’s and women’s basketball was just really good,” Petitti told The Athletic last week.

It’s a similar move to the…

IOWA CITY, Iowa — In the practice facility where Caitlin Clark’s famous intensity was on display nearly every day for four years, Lucy Olsen runs through the same drills with the same amount of effort while showcasing a little more joy and a much larger smile.

It’s a slight difference in optics between Clark, who currently leads the WNBA in assists as a rookie, and Olsen, who is replacing her world-renowned predecessor as Iowa’s point guard after three stellar seasons at Villanova. But there’s little difference in competitive fire, which Olsen’s smile conceals and her new teammates embrace every time she takes the court.

“You can tell she just loves basketball,” said senior guard Sydney Affolter, one of two returning starters from the Hawkeyes’ national runner-up squad. “She loves to be here. She loves getting after it. But she’s so hard-working. In scrimmage, she’ll push you and not take it easy on anyone.

“She’s definitely lighthearted, but she can be mean on the floor.”

Olsen, who stands 5 foot 10, finished third in Division I in scoring last season, her 23.3 points per game trailing only Clark (31.6) and USC’s JuJu Watkins (27.1). For the second consecutive season, Olsen will be following up the nation’s leading scorer; her former Wildcats…

CHICAGO — With 43.4 seconds left and the clock stopped after a foul, Angel Reese walked by herself toward the faraway Chicago Sky basket, smiling and clapping with that familiar look on her face.

Forget Vogue and the Met Gala, this was a proper runway.

After two losses to the Indiana Fever in Indianapolis, Reese and the Sky were in the lead, in control, and Reese knew it.

While the remaining basketball after that moment was, to put it nicely, a little frenzied, Reese and the Sky held on for an 88-87 victory over Caitlin Clark and the Fever on Sunday at a raucous, packed Wintrust Arena.

Round 3 goes to Angel Reese and the Chicago Sky.

During the week leading up to the game, Sky forward Marina Mabrey told a few of us that if this really were a rivalry, she hoped it would be billed as “Sky-Fever” and not “Caitlin Clark vs. Angel Reese.” Mabrey knew the drama was good for the league but didn’t think the two highly scrutinized rookies needed that extra weight.

But let’s be real: Clark and Reese are inexorably linked after their college battles. After two Clark wins in the WNBA portion of this personal series, it was Reese who came out on top in a nationally televised ESPN game, and she needed it.

INDIANAPOLIS — Athletes often speak in generalities as a defense mechanism. Rather than go in-depth on a potentially controversial topic, or even address the issue at all, they provide non-answers, using cliches and pre-programmed talking points to stay at a safe distance.

A part of me would like to believe that that’s what Caitlin Clark did Thursday morning when I asked if she was bothered by fans using her name as a weapon in the culture wars dividing the country. The Indiana Fever’s star guard didn’t close the door on the subject; she refused to even open it.

“No,” she declared. “I don’t see it. I don’t see it. That’s not where my focus is. My focus is here and on basketball. That’s where it needs to be, that’s where it has been, and I’m just trying to get better on a daily basis.”

Kate Martin wants to make one thing clear: She is a punctual person.

That bus in Dallas that left her in the parking lot after a Las Vegas Aces team meal? “They set me up,” Martin says of her teammates’ recent viral prank on the rookie. “Come on, now. I would never be late.

“Coach (Becky Hammon) said she had to talk to me, and then I was talking to her — of no substance. I was really confused. I thought it was something important, and then they had been planning it the whole time.”

The Aces’ bus almost left without Kate Martin

@_ajawilson22 pic.twitter.com/GXPQzSRdUc

— The Athletic WBB (@TheAthleticWBB) June 5, 2024

In fairness, everyone on the Aces acknowledges Martin’s discipline. As Hammon says, “She just doesn’t make mistakes.” It’s one of the many reasons Las Vegas — the players, the coaches, the fans — has come to love Martin, as she keeps living the best feel-good story in the WNBA.

One month into the season, Martin is averaging more than 20 minutes per game for the two-time defending champs and is often Hammon’s first sub off the bench, which makes it easy to forget how noteworthy it is that Martin is in this position. She averaged double-digit scoring once in her five years at Iowa, while playing in the national spotlight cast on…

On Jan. 19, two days after he became the most coveted football player in the NCAA’s transfer portal, and mere hours after he welcomed Ohio State coaches for a recruiting visit, Caleb Downs announced his change-of-address plans. The freshman safety who’d earned second-team All-America honors at Alabama committed to the Buckeyes. Not long after, Downs and his father began relocating to Columbus.

Getting there was simple enough. Getting around was another matter.

Some wheels needed to be put in motion.

“I get a call from someone on the coaching staff and they said, ‘Hey, I’m here with Caleb and his dad now. Are you looking to add somebody else to your team?’” says Rick Ricart, the CEO and owner of Ricart Automotive Group in Columbus. “Would you be willing to do a car deal for him?’”

For decades, these were shifty conversations. Local car dealerships had long been conduits for the whispered inducements coaches or boosters promised talented players. When discovered, scandal erupted. Repercussions were often stark. Then came the seismic summer of 2021, when changes to Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) rules allowed college athletes to earn money without fear of NCAA sanctions.

Car dealers nationwide quickly exchanged leases and keys for players boasting about their new…

After a weekend of having the most overanalyzed flagrant foul in WNBA history force-fed down my social media timeline, I woke Monday to learn the feeding was far from over. Good Morning America and other Disney-owned shows devoted entire segments to Chennedy Carter’s hip check of Caitlin Clark, as if there had never been a flagrant foul in the league’s history.

Later Monday, the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board used its institutional voice to declare that the foul “would have been seen as an assault” had it happened outside of a sporting event.

Can we calm down and take a breath? It was a hip check; repeat … a hip check! Did Carter bump her from the side when Clark was looking away and waiting on an inbound pass? Yes. Did Clark embellish her fall to the ground? Appeared that way. Did it deserve a flagrant designation? Absolutely. But the pearl-clutching that has followed is as exhausting as it is nauseating.

Did The Tribune editorial board do a think piece when the Sky rookie Angel Reese was slammed to the court and Alyssa Thomas of the Connecticut Sun was ejected? Why not? But a hip check deserves commentary and is likened to a crime in a city that has had more than enough problems with street violence? Make it make sense.

Had I not watched in real time, I would…

Two weeks ago, Iowa coach Lisa Bluder walked out of her corner office, moseyed 20 feet down the hall, and poked her head in assistant Jan Jensen’s office. Bluder had just made her retirement public and the university named Jensen — her longtime associate head coach — her successor.

“I promise I won’t leave you too much junk in there,” Bluder told her, motioning back to her (and soon-to-be Jensen’s) office.

Bluder and her staff have been in these offices for more than a decade since the building was renovated, and like any well-lived space, things have accumulated. Photos, letters, trophies, plaques — you name it. Any free tabletop is fair game for storing scouting reports and box scores. In recent seasons, as the wins piled up, more rings and pieces of net took up space, too.

The move is a long time coming. During her 30-year career, Jensen has had several opportunities to leave her spot as an assistant under Bluder, but it was never the right decision until now when she’ll make the move one seat to the right on the bench and two doors down the hallway.

“Nobody loves this place like I do.” @goiowa x #Hawkeyes pic.twitter.com/etkzPEOikO

— Iowa Women’s Basketball (@IowaWBB) May 16, 2024

They have known each other too long for Bluder to not leave a letter…

RANCHOS VERDES, Calif. — Palm trees, a Pacific Ocean view and courtyard dinners at the Terranea Resort provided the backdrop this week for one of the Big Ten’s most important group of meetings in the league’s 128-year history.

More than 100 administrators, university leaders, faculty representatives and head coaches from the Big Ten’s 18 members and league office gathered at this plush, picturesque location to discuss an upcoming legal settlement that fundamentally will change college athletics. Those officials were sequestered with security for every function, ranging from outdoor meals to friendly mixers.

The topics weren’t limited to what’s known as the House v. NCAA case, which will cost the NCAA and its member schools $2.7 billion should it be approved. The league added a four-school West Coast wing starting this year, and the spring meetings were as much of a networking event as an opportunity to explore a path forward as a league and an industry.

“I think that we have a chance at this moment right now in college athletics to really reshape the model in the most meaningful way in our lifetimes and maybe the most meaningful way that has ever been,” said Illinois athletic director Josh Whitman, the new Division I Council chair. “How can we build this new…

IOWA CITY, Iowa — Only a handful of hours after the Iowa women’s basketball team landed home from its summer trip to Croatia last year, the coaches had barely dropped off their luggage at home before returning to Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

As then-interim athletics director Beth Goetz shared her short-term vision for the department, then-women’s basketball coach Lisa Bluder and then-associate coach Jan Jensen stood bleary-eyed in the back of the room, offering unwavering support. In retrospect, the reason sounds, well, reasonable.

“How do you show that this is our person?” Jensen told The Athletic two months later. “When you show up. It wasn’t even a question.”

Goetz was hired as Iowa’s full-time athletics director in January. This week, she had the chance to reciprocate that faith in her by naming Jensen as Bluder’s replacement as women’s basketball head coach.

“How amazing is it when the easy choice is the right choice and in Caitlin Clark’s words, the only choice?” Goetz said Wednesday.

On the surface level, Jensen’s hiring appears almost a formality. Jensen, 55, worked alongside Bluder for 32 years, first as an assistant at Drake, then the last 24 as the associate head coach at Iowa. The Hawkeyes…