Critics will get hung up on Kara Lawson’s lack of head-coaching experience. But this next generation of leaders has been busy playing pro ball and exploring all the doors it opens.
A few months before the Los Angeles Sparks and New York Liberty played the first WNBA game in 1997, the NCAA Final Four featured a quartet of teams far more familiar to women’s basketball fans: Notre Dame, Old Dominion, Stanford and eventual champion Tennessee.
Or put in an equally familiar way: Muffet McGraw, Wendy Larry, Tara VanDerveer and Pat Summitt.
Four esteemed coaches who piled up national championships, Olympic gold medals and several thousand wins between them. Four women who, when they were barely out of college themselves in their early-to-mid 20s, started their coaching careers with little institutional support and even less financial reward. And four women who persevered.
Kara Lawson is part of their legacy. She learned from the late Summitt at Tennessee. So did former Lady Vols star Nikki McCray-Penson. Niele Ivey experienced the same under McGraw’s watch at Notre Dame, first as a player and later as an assistant coach.
And now those three — with McCray-Penson’s three seasons in charge at Old Dominion representing the full extent of their collective women’s college basketball head-coaching experience — are three of the biggest hires of the offseason. They hold some of the most coveted coaching real estate in women’s basketball: McCray-Penson at Mississippi State, Ivey at Notre Dame and now Lawson at Duke after she was named the Blue Devils’ coach Saturday.
But as much as they are connected to the game’s past as protégés of legends, they are even more indicative of where we are going. Someone with no prior head-coaching experience beyond USA Basketball’s 3-on-3 teams, Lawson represents the boldest experiment. It’s time for the next generation of innovators and leaders who, nearly 25 years after the birth of the WNBA, have been busy playing professional basketball and exploring the doors it opens.
Look at it this way. When Summitt played in the 1976 Olympics, she famously had to get back in shape because, already two years into her Tennessee tenure at 24 years old, she was well conditioned for a coach — but not an Olympian. When Lawson played in the 2008 Olympics, she was in her sixth professional season and already had a WNBA championship to her name.
