If she is not fired, I will leave. Coach Kara Lawson said she had a misunderstanding with her star player.
I’ll go if she’s not let go. Coach Kara Lawson claimed that she and her standout player had a disagreement.
In an interview with The Daily Coach, Duke women’s basketball coach Kara Lawson discussed the importance of a strong message and how to gain players’ trust.
Her entire life, she had played point guard and was a vocal player on the floor.
But Coach Pat Summitt was determined to give Kara Lawson even more voice confidence when she got to the University of Tennessee.
Lawson remarked, “She made me attend a lot of press conferences, gave me lots of practice opportunities, and stressed the importance of it to me.”
My weakness in that area did not grant me the ability to ignore or conceal it. You need to improve the areas where you are weak.
Now coaching women’s basketball at Duke for over twenty years, Lawson is regarded as one of the more intelligent and endearing figures in collegiate athletics.
Millions of people have viewed her pre- and post-practice speeches to her players on social media, and she even made an appearance on TODAY.
Lawson was recently interviewed by The Daily Coach, who discussed Summitt’s enduring influence on her, the importance of a strong message, and the elements of building trust with players.
For clarity, this interview has been shortened and modified.
Thank you so much, Coach, for doing this. You grew up in Northern Virginia; I know that. When you were a child, who influenced you?
Growing up, I tried practically everything. I discovered that my two favorite sports were basketball and soccer by the time I was in the fourth or fifth grade. I also discovered that my favorite activities were team sports. It became a matter of choosing a college sport, and by the conclusion of my sophomore year in high school, I had decided on basketball.
The majority of the women I looked up to were either female track athletes like Jackie Joyner-Kersee or Florence Griffith Joyner, or just other women I would see compete on the international scene, as the WNBA wasn’t even a thing when I was growing up. Michael Jordan would be liked by someone my age. He was the world’s top athlete when he was a child, growing up in the 1980s and 1990s.
You wind up attending Tennessee after having an excellent high school career. I know you’re frequently questioned about Coach Summitt, but how did she most assist you, in your opinion?
I had good fortune. She offered me an opportunity to start by switching to point guard. It was an enormously heavy burden. I wasn’t even close to being finished when I arrived. She was quite adept at identifying your strengths and areas for improvement, both on and off the court.
She pointed out that I needed to get better at communicating, emphasizing to me the importance of it beyond just being a point guard. This was more off the court and helped me feel more at ease speaking in front of the group, the media, our team, and going to schools to speak—all the things that come with being a player at a major institution.
Was there ever a point when everything simply clicked and you started to feel more comfortable speaking?
I’m not sure if I ever had the notion, “This is fantastic!” When I have to speak in front of people, I still feel those things. But I was tremendously helped by the repetition. Your level of confidence increases as you practice a task more. I know I can perform well, even if I am a little nervous or scared. I employ that.
If you can communicate effectively, you can encourage and inspire others to perform at their highest level. Having the ability to use it effectively is a great strength since it allows you to influence someone’s perceptions of themselves, their situation, where they are in life, and their potential.
When you consider it, that’s among the greatest things a human being can accomplish. It’s quite potent, and I’ve had the good fortune to surround myself with people who have made a difference for me. My parents, coaches, and teachers. I’m grateful to be in a position to help others in that way, and I don’t take the obligation lightly. It’s an incredible feeling to be able to inspire others and have them feel you when you talk.
Would you mind going back to your early coaching career? After a fantastic WNBA career, you worked for ESPN before joining the Boston Celtics as an assistant. What was the secret that allowed you to quickly gain the confidence of stars?
I make an effort to view it this way. People generally want you around more when you can improve them in some way, whether it’s by making them feel better, helping them do better at work, or otherwise improving them while you’re with them. People trust you most of the time. People will almost always give you more of themselves.
I doubt that I accomplished anything noteworthy. All I wanted was to spend as much time as possible getting to know the players and developing close bonds with them; I didn’t do it for any other reason.
Another issue was that I didn’t do any interviews while I was in Boston. First off, I’m not sure if assistant coaches ought to be giving a lot of interviews to the media. That could simply be a philosophical issue.
I never wanted the players to believe it was ever about me, even if everyone wanted to write articles about female coaches. They weren’t evil; they just had good intentions. I must have declined one hundred requests. I’m not making this up. I remember the Celtics asking me to do one or two for the team, maybe one more, but each time they approached me, I would say no. I never wanted a piece about me to be read by the players. It is they, not me, who should be the subject of the articles.
As a head coach at Duke, I do a couple more now, but to be honest, I reject about 99 percent of queries because I’m not the person in the story. Our athletes and program are the story, and I always want to put that front and center.
