In her father's courtroom in New York, the court reporters, officers, clerks, they all knew about Judge Stephen Gottlieb's daughter, the successful basketball coach. In the hallways of New York University where Chris Gottlieb is a law professor, people always stop to ask how the Bears are doing.
Law is the Gottlieb family business. Stephen Gottlieb is now retired after 19 years on the bench in Queens County. Chris Gottlieb is an adjunct professor of clinical law at NYU.
Older brother Peter Gottlieb is a lawyer in New York. Sister Suzy broke the mold and became a veterinarian. But youngest child Lindsay, the second-year Cal head coach, was always about basketball, even as she pulled the grades for an Ivy League education and talked as a kid about being a senator or a Supreme Court justice.
But maybe that's because I don't know anything about sports. At 35, Lindsay Gottlieb qualifies as one of the best young coaches in the game after leading the Bears to their first share of the Pac title, earning conference coach of the year honors along the way. ET in the Spokane Regional semifinals. A win would send Cal to the Elite Eight for the first time in school history. Cal is an experienced, balanced team led by a cerebral head coach who admits she is a "basketball nerd," stresses strong personal connections with her players and can't help but analyze everything to within an inch of its life.
Gottlieb would watch games as an year-old college player at Brown, picturing when she might call timeout in a crucial situation, or when it would be time to score quickly and then foul to stop the clock. In game moments I experience now, I'd be lying if I said I hadn't already imagined them in some way. Gottlieb's path to Berkeley came via Cal's former coach, Joanne Boyle.
