They play hoops out west too.

Leftcoasthoops.com covers the women’s games with a decidedly West Coast slant. We cover the Pac-12, the WAC, the WCC and beyond. We talk to players and coaches, we are at the big games. And we’ll always keep one eye on the national scene.

In-depth, insightful and in-the-know. The scoop on women’s hoops.

Michelle Smith is the editor and founder of leftcoasthoops.com.
An award-winning sports writer, she has more than 20 years experience working as a journalist for some of the largest papers and publications in the country.

Currently, a full-time contributor to espnW.com, Smith has spent the last 17 years covering women’s basketball at every level and for publications such as AOL Fanhouse, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, the Oakland Tribune, Sports Illustrated for Kids, ESPN.com, CBS Sportsline, Hoop Magazine, Lindy’s Sports Annuals and Women’s Basketball Magazine.

She’s been a frequent guest on local television and national radio shows, including Comcast Sports Net, Fox Sports Net, National Public Radio and out-of-market radio stations and is the author of four children’s books on professional women’s basketball (WNBA) for Scholastic Publishing. She won an Associated Press Sports Editors Award for enterprise reporting in 1994 for a series of stories on women athletes and motherhood.

Smith began her sportswriting career at her local paper, the Hayward Daily Review, covering youth and high school sports in 1988. She became the sports media columnist in 1991 and assumed the women’s sports and women’s basketball beats in 1994. She was hired at the San Francisco Examiner in 1998, and moved to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2000 when the papers merged.

Michelle grew up in the East Bay, near San Francisco and is married to fellow sportswriter Jerry McDonald of the Oakland Tribune and has two children.