Kara Lawson At ACC Basketball Tipoff

First our apologies: we thought that the men’s ACC Basketball Tipoff was on Tuesday. Actually the women went first on Tuesday and the men are up Wednesday.

For Duke, Kara Lawson is excited about getting started and says that consistency and maintaining standards is the key: “We hope to be more consistent in meeting our standard. We want to be a better defensive team than we were a year ago. We want to be more disruptive. We want to be more complete offensively. So you just try to be more consistent in those areas.”

Although Lexi Gordon, Miela Goodchild, Jade Williams and Onome Akinbode-James are gone, Kara Lawson has some wonderful players to work with, notably Shayeann Day-Wilson, who was a terrific point guard as a freshman. Celeste Taylor an dVanessa de Jesus also return and Lawson brought in some talented players, like freshman Ashlon Jackson, a McDonald’s All-American from Texas, 6-6 Kennedy Brown who comes over from Oregon State, and Reigan Richardson, who comes over from Georgia..

For the most part, it was the sort of coach speak that one expects to hear at events like this, but there were some interesting moments.

A reporter tried to suck her into commenting on UNC’s Courtney Banghart’s comments on State fans but she was too smart to bite.

Another reporter asked her if she felt settled in and she pointed out that due to the pandemic and the restrictions that she really hadn’t been out much.

Like most coaches, it takes a while to get her own players in and it’s probably fair to say that every coach would prefer to have the players she or he recruited. She has a lot more of that now so in a sense, we’ll finally see what a Kara Lawson team is like.

• Lawson, in third season, seeking consistency from Duke women’s basketball
• Lawson: People have been talking trash about me since I was at Tennessee
• Watch: Duke Women’s Basketball: United In Their Goals
• ACC Tipoff let NCSU, UNC, Duke women’s coaches set the tone for upcoming season