Morris Phillips of East Bay Express does a really nice piece on Cal coach Joanne Boyle: A Coach's Job Begins Off the Court : Coach Joanne Boyle has built the Cal women's basketball program by treating team members as people as well as players.

It was Boyle's big break — if only she could find common ground with a close-knit and probably skeptical group of players. But the situation was difficult, Barbour said. "She recognized the dynamic right away," the athletic director recalled, "and then she did all the right things."

Lindsay Gottlieb, Boyle's top assistant at Richmond and also for her first three years at Cal, remembers a rougher transition. "That first year was unlike anything else we had experienced," Gottlieb said. "Those players looked at us like aliens from another planet. But Joanne worked day after day to gain their trust."

Boyle stood by a simple pitch, and made it stick in her daily interactions with the team: "I know how to do this. We can do it together."