You’ve Gotta Love Multitasking with Jen Cooper

Sarah Spain (0:01)

Welcome to Good Game with Sarah Spain, where we're thankful for the WNBA fans out there tracking when players unfollow their own team on social media. Consider our interests peaked. It's Friday, November 13th. Happy Friday the 13th, y'all. On today's show, NWSL Broadcast Stats Manager and Historian, Jen Cooper, joins us to preview this weekend's semi-finals. We also discuss her favorite stats of the year, the unique way she watches and listens to soccer games, and the player she thinks was the biggest snub in the end of season award nominations. Plus, it's about damn time, keeping the best teams apart and celebrating the only time it pays to be bad. It's all coming up right after this.

Welcome back, Slices. Happy Friday. Here's what you need to know today.

Let's start with the NWSL, where the semi-finals are here. On Saturday afternoon, the No. 3 seed, Washington Spirit, will host the No. 7 Utah Royals at 12 p.m. Eastern. That game will air on CBS and stream on Paramount Plus. As a reminder, the Spirit will be hosting at Rowdy Outie after the team successfully managed to get kickoff time for a Division 3 football game moved with the help of one of the team sponsors. Then on Sunday, No. 1 seed, Gotham FC will kick off against the No. 4 Kansas City Current at 3 p.m. Eastern. That game will air on ABC and stream via the ESPN app. Gotham will be hosting this win at Icahn Stadium in Manhattan due to the bad field conditions at their normal home venue, Sports Illustrated Stadium in Harrison, New Jersey. We discussed all that earlier in the week. Go back and listen in case you missed it. Winners of the semifinals advance to the NWSL Championship on November 21st in DC at Outie Field. Where will be? That's right. All three members of Big Citrus will be in DC for the final, and we're doing a live Good Game at FanFest at 4 p.m. the day of the game. More details to come. And plenty more to say about this weekend's semifinals in just a few minutes with Jen Cooper.

More NWSL. On Thursday, the Orlando Pride announced the hiring of Yolanda Thomas as the team's new head coach. Thomas has been with the club since 2023, working as an assistant coach for the last four seasons and serving as interim head coach since Seb Hines was fired in August. When Thomas stepped into the interim position a few months ago, she became the first black woman to serve as head coach of an NWSL team, and now she's the first to do so on a permanent basis too. In an interview with ESPN's Jeff Kassouf, Thomas said she wants people to both celebrate the first while lamenting why it never happened before. It's not like there weren't good candidates. There were. For that reason, I'm also sitting with the dichotomy of those things.

We'll link to Jeff's full story in the show notes.

More soccer. Ahead of the 2027 Women's World Cup in Brazil next summer, FIFA has updated the draw rules that will be used for the tournament. The biggest note is that the top four teams in the world will be kept in separate sections of the bracket until the semifinal round, provided they each win their group. As it stands now, the top four teams in order are Spain, the United States, Germany, and England. Those top four standings will be locked in on December 7th, just a few days ahead of the draw, December 11th. Before then, however, some teams still have to qualify for the tournament. That includes the US, who will play El Salvador on November 27th with a spot in the World Cup on the line.

To hockey and the ongoing IIHF Women's World Championship. Group play ended on Wednesday with the US finishing at the top of Group A thanks to their 4-0 record, outscoring their opponents 31-2 along the way. Canada, meantime, won Group B, also going 4-0 and outscoring their opponents 26-1. That means the earliest the US and Canada could meet is the gold medal game, as both teams are now on opposite sides of the bracket. The quarterfinals get under way today, with Canada facing off against Czechia at 9 a.m. Eastern, and the US playing host nation Denmark at 1 p.m. Eastern. Provided the US wins that one, they'll move on to the semifinal Sunday, where they'll play the winner of Sweden-Switzerland.

To College Hoops, there are a couple top tier matchups this Sunday, including the Battle of the Real SC, as in number one ranked South Carolina, hosting number three Southern California. That game tips off at 1 p.m. Eastern on ABC. At the same time, number eight Vanderbilt travels to number 10 Iowa. That game will be on FS1. Then at 5 p.m. Eastern on ESPN, it's number four UConn versus number seven Louisville. The last of four straight against ranked opponents for the UConn Huskies. We'll link to the full College Hoops schedule in the show notes so you can follow along. To the WNBA, the draft lottery is this Sunday with the winning team receiving the number one overall pick in the 2027 WNBA draft. Six teams will participate in the lottery. The LA Sparks, Portland Fire, Seattle Storm, Toronto Tempo, Washington Mystics, and Houston Comets. Now normally, only teams that failed to qualify for the most recent playoffs participate in the lottery. So where are the Chicago Sky and the Phoenix Mercury?