“What the hell was in that wine?”

We consider a corpus of conversational narratives which arise in the complex, multiparty setting of pre- and post-game stretching sessions of a women’s elite basketball team. Our focus is on the characteristics of story openings within this corpus, and we consider how stories are launched; how roles of story opener and teller are distributed within the group, reflecting both entitlement to tell stories and social relationships between the participants; and what strategies are used to introduce different kinds of stories into the interaction. We suggest that the team from which the stories derive represents a modern-day ‘society of intimates’, and show that patterns of story opening and telling reflect this — and correlate with institutional and social roles and relationships.