Duke Introduces Kara Lawson As Their New Head Coach Of The Women's Basketball Program
Kara Lawson has many titles to her name!
What are they?
WNBA Player, Broadcaster, Assistant Coach for Boston in the NBA.
She played 13 seasons in the WNBA where she she averaged 9.8 points (41.4% FG, 39.0% 3-PT), 2.6 rebounds, and 2.5 assists over 377 career games with the Sacramento Monarchs, Connecticut Sun, and Washington Mystics from 2003 to 2015. In addition to her WNBA career, which included a championship with the Monarchs in 2005 and an All-Star appearance in 2007, Lawson was a member of the Team USA roster that captured the gold medal at the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing. “according to https://www.nba.com/celtics/roster/coaches/kara-lawson
She was an analyst for Washington as well as working for ESPN as a game and studio analyst for both Men’s and Women’s College Basketball as well as the NBA.
Now Kara Lawson can add another title to her name!
What is it?
Head Coach of the Duke Women’s Basketball Program.
Kara Lawson replaces Joanne P. McCallie who resigned after thirteen seasons as the head coach of Duke.
McCallie was 330-107 in her 13 seasons and was a three-time league coach of the year. Her teams won at least a share of the regular-season title four times and three ACC tournament titles while also making 10 trips to the NCAA tournament, including four consecutive trips to the Elite Eight in 2010-13. “according to an article by Mechelle Voepel on espn.com
But with the arrival of Notre Dame and Louisville into the ACC, Duke's success began to wane. The Blue Devils have not been in the league's top three in the regular season in four of the past seven seasons.according to an article by Mechelle Voepel on espn.com
On Monday Kara Lawson had her introductory press conference!
What intrigued me about her introductory press conference?
Her response to what a Kara Lawson team would look like.
She had this to say.
"I'll tell you a story. I was coaching a 3-on-3 team in 2018. We went down to Buenos Aires, Argentina for the Youth Olympic Games. We had some really good players on that team, young players, high school players, that were really talented. We ran certain offenses, obviously you look at the skills of your players and see how can you adjust to their skills and strengths. We won the gold medal. Great team, very dominant team. The next year, we had a new group of players. I brought them over to Mongolia to play in the World Cup. During the first couple days of practice I started to implement a lot of the actions that were very successful for us the previous year, but with different players. It was not a fit. It did not work. I remember going home after the second night of practice and ripping up the play book saying this is not going to work. We had to find something that worked for them and aligned with their skill sets. We changed. I think [Dr.] Kevin [White] brought up a good word … adaptability. I'm not going to sit here and say we are going to play this way or that way. I think the ability to be adaptable and have players that are adaptable is vital. I am not going to make any statements of what we are going to do and who we are going to be but I am going to figure out what works for us and strive to master that. If you keep it simple in terms of your goals that gives you a chance to really achieve them."
Being able to adapt to players from one year to the next is a great strait to have! Why? Because every season, every year is going to be different because you will have different players. Someone who knows a great deal about this is Duke Men’s Basketball Head Coach Mike Krzyzewski . Why? Because every year he has freshman that come in that are likely declare for the NBA Draft after the season ends . He has done it every year and I feel that Kara Lawson will be able to do it too and the Duke Women’s Basketball team will be better because of it.