Ex-Rainbow Wahine Maj Forsberg makes mark in WNBA landscape as league’s only female crew chief

The University of Hawaii’s bench was where Maj Forsberg’s basketball dream seemed destined to meet its thwarted and logical end.

After sitting through a 7,000-mile trip from Denmark, where she had been a member of the national team, and then four years (1996-2000) on the Rainbow Wahine’s sideline, Forsberg could have resigned herself to having just a meager 1.2 points a game scoring average to show for it.

Or, she could have resigned, period, moving on.

Instead, looking past disappointment, she glimpsed opportunity. Overcoming frustration, she found focus.

Now, 20 years after graduation, she has achieved an elite level basketball career as a referee and the WNBA’s only female crew chief.

This month in the Florida bubble she will work her ninth year of the WNBA playoffs and seventh finals. She’s done the NCAA Final Four three times, the amateur World Championships and, until the pandemic hit, was to have refereed in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

“I always joke around when I say it — and I tell Vince (Goo, her former UH coach) this, too — I found a profession where I get all 40 minutes every night,” Forsberg said. “Nobody can take me out of the game, right? There is a fun little irony in that.”

At UH her problem wasn’t Goo, but the combination of a high school ankle injury that never fully allowed her to return to form and having an all-conference point guard, BJ Itoman, in front of her for three years.

In fact, she counts Goo and former University of Hawaii at Hilo men’s coach Jimmy Yagi and his wife, Jeanne, as some of the most influential, career-changing people in her life.

It was a chance meeting with the Yagis at a basketball camp and clinic in her hometown of Horsholm, Denmark, and the long friendship that grew from it that started her on the way to UH. The Yagis were impressed not only with her work ethic but her intelligence and recommended her to Goo, who offered a scholarship.

With family on her mother’s side in Japan, Forsberg said Hawaii instantly seemed a natural bridge in her life. Negotiating the basketball span would be more challenging. “It was a difficult transition for me going from starting on the national team and a successful club team to spending a lot of time on the bench,” Forsberg said.

A finance and marketing major who would become an all-conference scholar-athlete with designs on a Wall Street career, Forsberg brought an analytical approach to her situation. Instead of being content to collect splinters and pass out towels, she used her time to break down the game and go deep into the psychology of the participant’s roles.

“I think just watching the game from a different perspective — I remember the legendary Violet Palmer refereeing our games in the WAC — there was a time when it finally clicked for me,” Forsberg said. “I asked myself, if I’m not ready to walk away from the game of basketball, then, (officiating) was something to think about.”

The interaction between referees and coaches intrigued her and Goo, the man who sat a few seats away, provided an interesting case study in the dynamics.

Subtly, and often comically tongue-in-cheek, Goo got his point across without being hostile, a court-side manner that allowed both parties to walk away with a smile. “With Vince, I really feel like I got on-the-job training just having that front-row seat,” Forsberg said. “I think it influenced me.”

She said, “Vince appreciated it when referees were able to communicate with him. You’re not saying, ‘I’m right and you’re wrong.’ But you understand where the other person is coming from.”

Forsberg said, “Part of my success is in being empathetic. It is amazing how much you can actually earn trust moving forward as opposed to saying, ‘Don’t talk to me. I’m right and this is going to be my way.’ ”

Almost as amazing, perhaps, as rising from one seemingly dead end in basketball to scaling new, unimagined heights in the sport.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.