Unbeatable Until Now with Nancy Armour

Sarah Spain (0:01)

Welcome to Good Game with Sarah Spain, where we love it when teams think outside the box. But the Kansas City current thinking outside the stadium when counting attendance, and the WNBA thinking outside the clock with the lunchtime finals game, that's taken things too far.

It's Tuesday, October 27th, and on today's show, longtime USA Today sports columnist Nancy Armour joins us from the Netherlands, where she covered the 2026 World Gymnastics Championships. We caught up with her on Sunday to hear why the sky is not falling for Team USA, despite their loss to China in the team competition, what the US needs to clean up to get ready for LA 28, and the one US gymnast Nancy is confident will be on that Olympic team. Plus size matters, an extra long lunch break, and start practicing that royal wave. It's all coming up right after this.

Welcome back, Slices, here's what you need to know today.

Starting with hoops, it's official. Game six of the WNBA finals will be held Thursday at 1230 p.m. Eastern at Atlanta State Farm Arena. That's a 930 a.m. tip-off local time for Valkyries fans. Weekday bottomless mimosa brunch spots in the Bay, gonna do numbers, that's for sure. ESPN broke the game news Monday, with the league confirming it shortly after. The MNBA's Atlanta Hawks game, which was originally scheduled for 7 p.m. at State Farm, will be moved to 8 p.m. Eastern. The news follows a weekend of negotiations to find a home for game six, requiring collaboration from the W, the MNBA, the Hawks, State Farm Arena, the Dream, the Valkyries, and broadcast partners to figure out the best course of action. Moving the game earlier in the day allows them to play at State Farm and avoid playing at the 3500-seat Gateway Arena, the Dream's home arena for most of the season. But why couldn't the Hawks play during the day and game six of the WNBA finals get the better tip-off time? We talk a lot in this show about how much the women's sports space has changed in such a short period of time, but battles for premium time slots at arenas and on TV continue. Game six of an 82-game NBA season versus game six of the finals? It should be a no-brainer, especially if the Dream win slash won game five and could win the title Thursday. It's just not fair for them to try to draw 18,000 plus and a big TV audience midday on a weekday.

Now, as you can tell, because I said one slash win, we're recording this before game five tips off on Monday night. So we'll see which team wins and gets the chance to hoist the trophy just in time for a buy one, get one free, happy hour celebration on Thursday. We trust you watched game five, we'll link to the results in the show notes just in case.

To the NWSL, where we wrap up a few games from the weekend. On Sunday, League leading Gotham FC beat the Orlando Pride two to one with friend of the show, Mitch Purse, opening the scoring in the 22nd minute and other friend of the show, Tiana Davidson, sending home the eventual game winner in the 62nd.

Also on Sunday, the KC Current won their match against the Washington Spirit two to one. A lot of early goals in that one. The Spirits, Clara Luvonga scored in the 13th minute, friend of the show, current midfielder Lola Bonta answered just a minute later. And then in the 17th minute, friend of the show, Croix Bethune assisted Vanessa DiBernardo's game winner. Not only was it DiBernardo's first goal of the season and first as a mom, it also marked Bethune's 11th assist of the season, setting a new single season NWSL record. Former Portland Thorns midfielder and US Women's National Team legend Tobin Heath set the previous record. She had 10 assists in the 2016 NWSL season. Now, many times, athletes only hear about breaking certain records after the game or when they're asked about it by the media. But Bethune said she knew this one was within reach. She told reporters after the match, quote, I was thinking about it a lot because I wanted to break that record really bad. But I mean, you can't focus on it too much or it won't happen. So it's just kind of going with the flow of the game and making sure we get the job done. End quote. Job done indeed. The fact that it took 10 years to break that record also says a lot about Heath. Back in 2016, when she set the record, the NWSL season was only 20 games long, and Heath only played in 14 of those because she spent a big chunk of the summer with the US Women's National Team preparing for and competing in the 2016 Rio Olympics. So to put that in perspective, it took Bethune 25 games to break a record that Heath set in 14