COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Kara Lawson has always been a trailblazer for women’s basketball, and now the Duke University coach has a legitimate chance to lead the United States to another gold medal.
She has already done it once.
Lawson guided the Americans to gold in 3-on-3 basketball at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, and she could have the chance to lead the 5-on-5 U.S. women’s team at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. First up is coaching the U.S. in the FIBA Women’s Americup, which starts Saturday in Chile.
Coaching is something Lawson has wanted to do since she was a young girl growing up in Virginia. She just didn’t know it would be for her country.I played for a long time, and so I got into coaching a little bit later just because I had a long playing career, which is as a good excuse as any to get into coaching later,” Lawson, 44, quipped during a recent interview with The Associated Press. “So I was always drawn to it. I just didn’t know what my entry point was.”
She thought it might be at the high school level, because the WNBA didn’t exist at that point and coaching a college team wasn’t something she strived to do. Fast-forward 37 years, though, and she’s in charge of the group of college players in South America to represent the U.S. at a 10-team tournament that includes fellow former champions Brazil and Canada.
“I’m fortunate enough to be assigned something as important as America’s head coach, my goal is to do the best job possible,” Lawson said during a break as she prepared her team for the Americup, which serves as a qualifying tournament for the 2026 FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup.
Lawson could become the second Black coach to lead a U.S. women’s basketball team at the Olympics. The first was Dawn Staley, the University of South Carolina coach who built her Gamecocks into an NCAA Division I dynasty and was the U.S. women’s head coach four years ago in Tokyo, where the Olympics took place a year later than originally scheduled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.Lawson was a point guard at the University of Tennessee from 2000-03, where she helped the Lady Volunteers — who still have never missed the NCAA tourney, which debuted in 1982 — reach the Final Four three times and twice finish as national runners-up. She credits her time learning under the iconic Pat Summitt as a big reason for her recent success roaming the sidelines.
“If you want to learn how to coach, why not go to the best coach?” Lawson said of the late Summitt, whose accomplishments as a pioneering coach who directed the Lady Vols to eight NCAA titles led to her induction in both the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame.Summitt also coached the U.S. women’s basketball team to Olympic gold in 1984 — when the host city was Los Angeles.
Lawson said she didn’t want to look at her current opportunity as a tryout to be the U.S. coach when the Olympics return to L.A. in three years — or even at next year’s World Cup in Germany, although she is already on the short list for that event. That decision will be made by Sue Bird, who is USA Basketball’s national team managing director for the women’s program, a position created earlier this year to match one that has long existed on the men’s side.
