THE WARMUP

Welcome to Volume I, Edition V of The Sunday Back Page.

This is your Sunday morning sports section — built for the inbox and made for independent creators. Every week, the best sports writing, podcasting, and storytelling from people who own what they build. No institutions. No legacy outlets. No algorithms deciding what you see. Just great work. Every Sunday morning.

Note: This week's email came from Beehiiv. That's where Sunday Back Page emails will live going forward. If you prefer Substack, every edition is still available on the website and in the app — just update your notification settings there.

THE LEAD

The handshake is one of the cleanest moments in sports.

Not the win. Not the trophy. The handshake.

It is the ritual that separates competition from war.

Every sport has its version.

In hockey, it's the playoff handshake line — a procession of men who spent weeks hitting, even fighting, each other, lining up single-file to look the other guy in the eye. Tennis players meet at the net.

The handshake says: we are competitors, not enemies. Whatever happened out there stays out there.

Some of the great ones, even the notoriously sour ones, have understood this instinctively.

In the 1976 Rose Bowl, Woody Hayes watched as Ohio State, playing for a national championship, fell apart against what was supposed to be an inferior UCLA. With 8 seconds left and the game long decided, Hayes crossed the field and shook hands with and hugged the much younger Dick Vermeil.

In 2016, after Kris Jenkins hit the buzzer-beater to win the national championship for Villanova, the whole arena exploded. Nova coach Jay Wright stood still, collected himself, and walked along the sideline to shake North Carolina coach Roy Williams' hand.

Bill Belichick became infamous for his quick and cold version.

Which brings us to Friday night in Phoenix.

Geno Auriemma felt he was snubbed by South Carolina's Dawn Staley during pregame introductions, when he stood alone in front of the scorer's table at halfcourt for several moments. Still, Staley had thought an earlier exchange had sufficed.

That festered through 40 minutes of basketball. When the buzzer sounded, Auriemma walked toward Staley and shook her hand, and then used it as an opportunity to berate her. Coaches from both teams had to step in. When it was over, Auriemma walked to the tunnel alone, skipping the line his own players were standing in.

He has since apologized.

The story of Friday night should have been South Carolina's dominant second half that ended UConn's 54-game winning streak and sent Staley's Gamecocks to Sunday's championship game. Geno turned the handshake into the headline instead.

Woody Hayes was no choir boy during his career, but he understood something that Geno forgot. The handshake isn't a courtesy. It's the last act of the game. And turning it into a confrontation isn't a statement about the other person.

It's a statement about you.

— Ian Powers

THE QUESTION

Dawn Staley coaches South Carolina in today's national championship game. A win would give her four titles — moving her into a tie for third on the all-time wins list among women's coaches, behind Geno Auriemma (12) and Pat Summitt (8). Who currently holds that third spot alone?

See answer below 👇

THE READS

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Our take: He won the gold in 12.99 seconds. The hard part came after. Shelby Hickman traces what happened when the most dominant hurdler in the world finally checked the last box — and found nothing waiting on the other side. Holloway's collapse at the 2025 World Championships is the evidence. Good reporting, well-told, from the University of Florida's student magazine.

Our take: Hannah Taylor tore her ACL the day after she found out she was pregnant. She delayed surgery for seven months, delivered with a torn knee, then rehabbed while caring for a newborn. That's the door into a piece that traces how far athlete maternity rights have come — from Allyson Felix breaking an NDA to call out Nike to the WTA's new paid maternity fund — and how far they still have to go. Personal entry point, thorough reporting, a subject the mainstream sports press still undercovers.

Our take: Five installments into a data-driven series on whether smaller clubs can topple entrenched European powers. This entry covers recruitment trends across Belgium, Austria, Bulgaria, Scotland and Croatia. The Scotland section alone is worth it: Hearts five points clear of Celtic, one year into a Tony Bloom rebuild, while Celtic have cycled through four managers and quietly stopped signing players they actually own. Start from Part One.

Our take: Mo Salah is leaving Liverpool this summer as a free agent. Jason Anderson at The Transfer Flow does the actual work of figuring out which MLS clubs could realistically make an offer — not which ones will get linked in tabloid rumor mills — and walks through the roster rules, salary cap mechanics and ownership dynamics that would make it possible. San Diego has the ownership connection and the roster opening if they can move Lozano. NYCFC has the market. D.C. United just loves signing aging Premier League forwards and letting the front office sort it out later. Good soccer business reporting.

Our take: Lali Michelsen traces the investment career of Lawrence Stroll — the man behind Tommy Hilfiger, Michael Kors, the Aston Martin F1 team, and now the Aston Martin car company — through one consistent lens: he buys distressed assets at the moment of maximum pain and then waits. The F1 team he bought out of administration for $120 million in 2018 is now valued at $3.2 billion. The car company is losing $323 million a year. The piece ends with the right question: is Aston Martin the same kind of bet as the others, or is it structurally different in ways that patience alone can't fix?

THE LISTEN

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Our take: Tommy Bennett recorded this one a day early. The Pirates called up Griffin — baseball's consensus No. 1 overall prospect — ahead of their home opener against Baltimore. Still a teenager for three more weeks, Griffin became MLB's first teenage position player since Juan Soto debuted in 2018. He hit an RBI double in his first major-league at-bat. Bennett also covers the Yankees' pitching and the Astros. Good episode to queue up now that the arrival is no longer coming — it's here.

THE WATCH

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite videos. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Our take: Henry Abbott and basketball guru David Thorpe cover a lot of ground in this video conversation, but they keep coming back to the same question: who can beat Oklahoma City in the NBA, and how do they do it? Good basketball thinking from two people who have been doing this a long time.

THE PRESSROOM

Matthew Doyle spent years as one of the defining voices in Major League Soccer coverage. In February, he moved his independent newsletter, Tactics Free Zone, off Substack entirely — migrating his subscriber list to Ghost, citing the platform's open-source model, cleaner infrastructure, and a growing community of soccer writers who'd already made the jump. His reason for leaving was plain: he didn't want to be dependent on a tech company when the incentives shifted. The move is a Pressroom story because Doyle isn't a fringe operator. He's an established voice making a deliberate call about where he builds — and the soccer creator community on Ghost is substantial enough that it factored into his decision.

THE ROSTER

We want to celebrate as many independent creators on The Sunday Back Page as possible. Here are all the people who either submitted their work for consideration or were considered independently this week. Many of these creators deserved a place in this newsletter, and we hope they continue to submit their work. Please keep them on your radar.

Jeshal | Kwame Twumasi-Ankrah | Heart of a Fan | T.J. Highley | Jorge Unger | FootballJo | Dom Johnson | Sando | Michael McDermott | JDB College Hoops | God is a Mitre | PJ Brown | Matthew Hughes | Kitcylopedia | The Hockey Writers | Sam on Sport | Jerry Gallagher III

Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!

THE ANSWER

Kim Mulkey is third on the all-time list with four national championships. She won three with Baylor (2005, 2012, 2019) and one at LSU (2023).