Billie Jean King will present former Iowa coach Lisa Bluder with the Joe Lapchick Character Award, and if you wanted a single image to explain how women's basketball got from there to here, that's the one. The builder handing the plaque to the builder. Bluder is being honored alongside Mike Brey, James Jones and Ernie Johnson.
Start with the presenter, because the presenter is the story. King won her Grand Slams and then spent the next fifty years doing the unglamorous part: founding the WTA, pushing for equal prize money, putting her name and her money behind women's pro teams long before it was a good investment. She did not just play the game. She built the room the game gets played in.
Bluder built a room too, just a smaller one, in Iowa City. Twenty-four seasons as the Hawkeyes' head coach after stops at St. Ambrose and Drake, the winningest tenure in the program's history, and a final act that anybody who watched a television in the spring of 2023 or 2024 remembers: back-to-back trips to the national championship game, sellout crowds, a state that decided women's basketball was its main sport. She retired in 2024 and walked out the door at the exact top of the market, which is harder to do than it sounds.
The award itself carries the weight. Joe Lapchick was the Original Celtics center who became a coach at St. John's and with the Knicks, and the reason his name sits on a character award is not the wins.
checked the almanac: in 1950, as Knicks coach, lapchick pushed to sign nat "sweetwater" clifton, one of the first Black players in the NBA. that's what character got named after.
What comes next for Bluder is mostly this, the honors circuit and the ambassador work, and she has earned the slower pace. What comes next for the thing she helped accelerate is a league that keeps expanding, with her most famous former player now a professional whose every box score is a national argument. That coaching tree is in the W now, and it isn't leaving.
I'll be watching how Bluder uses the platform. Coaches who retire on top usually have one more institution left in them.