Duke’s Kara Lawson Doesn’t Care If You Underestimate Her

Sunday, February 1 was a cold day in Durham, with temperatures falling below freezing and snow blanketing the campus of Duke University. But inside the Bill Brill Media Room in Cameron Indoor Stadium, Blue Devils women’s basketball coach Kara Lawson was burning up, agitated with how her team had just performed.

“I wasn’t happy with it. I thought it was the worst half we had played in some time,” she said. “Just not competing the way we need to compete. Just letting our foot off the gas and not respecting the game in the way that you need to be a good team. So, it’s a little frustrating.”

Most coaches wouldn’t be this disappointed after a 36-point victory over Wake Forest.

In her six seasons at Duke, Lawson has tried to instill in her players that same intensity. She went viral four years ago when the university shared a video of Lawson telling her players that life “will never get easier,” so they should learn to “handle hard better.” Her world-class competitiveness and desire to win have been the driving principles for the Blue Devils under Lawson’s direction. 

It has led them to some great heights—like an Atlantic Coast Conference championship and Elite Eight appearance in the NCAA Tournament last season—and gotten them through some disastrous lows, like their 3-6 start to this season.

After a string of defeats in November and December, critics started wondering whether Lawson was ready for her other, more high-pressure job: leading Team USA’s Women’s National Team in the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. Lawson held the first training camp for the national team at Duke in December. On a media call afterward, a reporter asked, given the Blue Devils’ rocky season to that point, “What makes you confident that you can still lead Team USA effectively?”

Lawson responded that seasons ebb and flow, and she would lean into her experience. “I didn’t get dumber,” she said, with a slight smile. 

Fast forward two months, and Lawson’s coaching acumen is no longer being challenged. Before losing at Clemson last Sunday—thanks to a 3-pointer with three seconds remaining—Duke had won 17 consecutive games, its longest winning streak in Lawson’s tenure and the Blue Devils’ best run since 2011. Duke still sits atop the ACC standings and is ranked No. 12 in this week’s Associated Press Top 25 Poll.

Duke will finish up its regular season on Sunday in Chapel Hill with a nationally televised clash against the Tar Heels.

In that game and any others that follow, Lawson says she won’t be trying to prove anything. She doesn’t think about whether she’s admired. She just wants her team to win.

“If we win, I’m not just going to smile and say, ‘You guys were all wrong about me.’ Like, who cares? That stuff doesn’t motivate me,” Lawson told The Assembly in an interview. “I just want to do the best I can and not worry about if people like me or don’t like me. That’s not something that makes me tick. I love the game of basketball. That’s why I’m here.”

‘You’re Going to Feel Her’

Lawson says she knew at the age of 7 that she wanted to be a coach. She didn’t know when it would happen or how, but Lawson was never not going to be a basketball coach.

“I knew that’s what I would do, and that’s why I went to Tennessee,” she said in the interview. “I figured, if you want to be a coach, go play for the best one.”

At Tennessee, Lawson played for the late Pat Summitt, who transformed the Lady Vols into one of the iconic programs in women’s college basketball and won eight national championships. In one of her books, Sum it Up, the Hall of Fame coach wrote about a young Kara.

“She was a brilliant, self-possessed, cool-handed guard,” Summitt wrote. “She turned down Duke and Stanford to come to Tennessee, where she carried a 4.0 (GPA) in finance and required an explanation for everything we did. I had to constantly keep my wits about me in dealing with her.”

Hearing that passage again, Lawson nodded in agreement.

“That’s been a pretty normal description for people that know me,” Lawson said. “I just want to know why things are done. When I was younger, sometimes people took that as disrespectful, but I was just trying to know how stuff worked. I have players that do that now, and it doesn’t bother me as much.”

After a 13-year playing career in the WNBA—where she won a championship with the now-defunct Sacramento Monarchs in 2005 and captured an Olympic gold medal in the 2008 Summer Games at Beijing—Lawson began coaching with Team USA, leading men’s and women’s 3-on-3 teams in age-group tournaments. After a few years of broadcasting and working within the national team program, a job offer finally came, but not one from the WNBA or collegiate ranks. In 2019, head coach Brad Stevens hired her to be an assistant coach with one of the NBA’s Cadillac franchises, the Boston Celtics.

“It is weird that my first job was in the NBA. A lot of times people are like, ‘Why’d you go to the men’s game first?’ Well, you go where someone offers you a job,” Lawson said. “I don’t say that with bitterness to the women’s game, but that’s why my start was there, because they were the only people interested.”

In summer 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Joanne P. McCallie resigned as Duke’s women’s head coach after 13 years. Duke had missed the NCAA Tournament for the second time in four seasons in 2019, and while the Blue Devils were on track to play in March Madness in 2020 before the tournament was canceled, the school hadn’t given any indication it planned to extend McCallie’s contract.

Lawson thought she might remain with the Celtics for a while, but coaching the Blue Devils was attractive. She knew Duke had the infrastructure and support to contend for championships. They had won ACC titles and regularly made deep NCAA Tournament runs under McCallie and her predecessor, Gail Goestenkors. Lawson also grew up in the ACC’s footprint, just a few hours north of Durham in Fairfax County, Virginia. She had always admired Duke, and the chance to coach in an elite women’s basketball conference was enticing.

At Duke, Lawson appears to have recruited players who are wired in similar ways that she is, who put winning and the team first and accept the structure Lawson has put in place.

“Pat Summitt—I’ve told Kara this many times—would be proud of her. They defend and they rebound,” said N.C. State coach Wes Moore, who coached against Summitt’s Tennessee teams when he was at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. “They’re playing with a whole lot of confidence.”

One way that fans can see that the Blue Devils are different from other teams is that all the players essentially dress the same on the court. No Duke player wears a headband, wristbands, sleeves, or T-shirts under their jerseys. All the players have their jerseys tucked in, even though that’s no longer required by the NCAA. Most of them wear the same color and model of shoe.

“That’s just our culture,” Lawson said. “They’re bought into it. You know, if they didn’t want to do it, they wouldn’t come here, right? Like, everybody knows the deal. Uniforms is not just a noun; it’s an adjective. So, a team should look the same.”

Lawson’s style isn’t for everyone. While college athletes transferring to new teams is no longer unusual, Duke has lost some standout talents during Lawson’s tenure, such as 2025 ACC Tournament MVP Oluchi Okananwa, who transferred to Maryland and told a reporter that she and Lawson “both wanted different things.” Lawson has had three different directors of communication in her six-year tenure. She is the only head coach in the ACC who doesn’t allow broadcasters from ESPN or other networks to watch her team’s practices or pregame shootarounds.

Texas native Ashlon Jackson, a senior guard and the first McDonald’s All-American recruit that Lawson landed at Duke, said the school wasn’t on her radar until Lawson got the job. After meeting with her, Jackson was sold pretty quickly. She said Lawson didn’t promise any playing time and made it clear that opportunities on the court had to be earned.

“I come from a hard coaching background, and that’s exactly what I wanted. I wanted someone to challenge me. I wanted to win. … And she’s won at every level,” Jackson told The Assembly. “She’s very intense. Whether you’re having a good day or a bad day, she’s going to challenge you. You’re going to feel her in the gym, but you’re going to leave that practice knowing that you got better, for sure.”

Off the court, Jackson said she sees a version of Lawson that fans and media rarely do.

“She trolls so much, mostly me,” Jackson said with a laugh. “She’s really funny; she’s down to earth. There’s not a problem that you can’t talk to her about.”

The Big Games

As Lawson prepares to coach Team USA in September at the FIBA World Cup in Germany, and in two years at the Los Angeles Olympics, she said her approach won’t be all that different, even though she’ll be working with some of the best professional players in the world. This Olympic cycle will also see stars of women’s basketball like Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers, and Angel Reese making their Team USA debuts. The national team players got a taste of Lawson’s coaching style at the December camp.

“I love Kara. Being able to play under a coach that coaches hard, I love hard coaching,” Reese said. “I love somebody that’s going to get on me and is going to be very intentional with me and everyone else and do what’s best for the team. She’s about her business, just like me. At the end of the day, she wants to win.”

Lawson said switching gears from guiding Duke to shepherding Team USA is a little bit like speaking different languages. She’ll still be sending the same messages, but the delivery method might change.

“You don’t have the same time spent with those players as you do (Duke) players, and they’re at a more advanced stage of their game and their life. They’re more fully formed as people and players. It’s just a different rhythm and flow to practices, games, and relationships,” Lawson said. “Fortunately for me, with my experiences, I’m fluent in a lot of different basketball languages.”

Few teams wearing the stars and stripes have won as much as the U.S. women. Team USA has won eight consecutive gold medals at the Olympics and four straight FIBA World Cup titles. The Americans haven’t lost in Olympic play since 1992, but—as evidenced by their 67-66 gold medal win over France in 2024, a game in which Lawson was the lead scout as an assistant coach—the rest of the world is catching up.

Sue Bird thinks that Lawson, who coached the USA women’s 3-on-3 team to a gold medal in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, is the right coach to keep the streak alive for the Americans and usher it into a new era. As managing director of the national team—and a five-time gold medalist herself—it was Bird’s decision to hire Lawson. And after playing with her in the 2008 Olympics, Bird knows what kind of competitor Lawson is.

“You always knew she was going to be prepared. You always knew that she was going for the jugular,” Bird said. “She wasn’t going to miss a moment.”

Being the head coach of the women’s national team is a big platform that comes with a loud microphone. Athletes competing in the recent Winter Olympics were asked questions about the culture and politics of this country. Some of the players who Lawson might feature for Team USA, such as Bueckers and Breanna Stewart, have spoken out against the actions of U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement in Minnesota.

2028 will also be an election year, and WNBA players have developed a reputation for activism. In 2020, many players wore shirts in support of Raphael Warnock’s bid for one of Georgia’s U.S. Senate seats and endorsed him over Kelly Loeffler, who was then the co-owner of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream. That same year, Lawson spoke at campaign events for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in North Carolina, just months after she was hired at Duke.

Since then, Lawson hasn’t publicly weighed in on politics much and says she wasn’t asked to appear at campaign events for Harris in 2024. She says she hasn’t given much thought to how she’ll handle political questions if she’s faced with them in the days leading up to the Olympics.

But she does have a grasp on the power of Team USA and what the squad means to many people. And what members of the team say or do may not matter all that much if the Americans don’t capture a gold medal in 2028. If they fail, Lawson will shoulder much of the blame.

“Every job that I have, I want to do right by every person associated with it. I had one chance at the Olympics. That was it. Everybody’s got to bring their best because we get one chance at this,” Lawson said. “And so that, more than anything, drives me—the urgency that you have to have to be successful and great in the highest level of competition.”