USA Basketball introduced the hiring of Kara Lawson as head coach for the USA Girls’s Nationwide staff on Monday.
Lawson is getting into her sixth season as head coach for Duke girls’s basketball, a program she led to an look within the 2025 NCAA Elite Eight.
“I’m so excited to welcome Kara Lawson as the subsequent head coach of the USA Basketball Girls’s Nationwide Group,” USA Basketball Girls’s Nationwide Group managing director Sue Chicken stated in a press release. “Having shared the court docket together with her, I do know firsthand the management, aggressive spirit and basketball I.Q. that she brings. Kara has at all times had the respect of her teammates and her gamers, one thing she has earned and demonstrated over many years with USA Basketball as a participant, 3×3 coach and assistant coach. I can’t wait to work together with her and proceed to construct on the custom of excellence that USA Basketball stands for.”
Lawson gained recognition when she served as an assistant coach for the Boston Celtics for one season earlier than being appointed as head coach for the Blue Devils.
She additionally turned the primary girl to work as a nationwide broadcast analyst for an NBA sport again in 2007, throughout a match between the Washington Wizards and the New Orleans Hornets (now the Pelicans).
Lawson’s Enjoying Credentials
Lawson performed NCAA basketball underneath the late Pat Summitt for the Tennessee Woman Vols, the place she was named to the All-SEC First Group for 4 consecutive years. She was drafted fifth general by the Detroit Shock within the 2003 WNBA Draft, simply to be traded to the Sacramento Monarchs 5 days after.
Lawson performed for 3 groups—Monarchs, Connecticut Solar, and Washington Mystics—throughout her 13-season profession within the WNBA and was a part of the Sacramento Monarchs’ championship staff in 2005. She was additionally named a WNBA All-Star in 2007.
Kara Lawson 2028 🫡@karalawson20 x 🇺🇸 #USABWNT pic.twitter.com/KDiWwEjKkp
— USA Basketball (@usabasketball) September 22, 2025
Lawson participated in USA Basketball and gained two gold medals as a participant: the 2001 World College Video games and the 2008 Summer time Olympics in Beijing.
“I’m honored to be chosen as the top coach of the Girls’s Nationwide Group for this cycle,” Lawson stated in a press release. “I need to thank Sue Chicken, Normal Dempsey and the USA Basketball Board of Administrators, Jim Tooley and Briana Gould for this great alternative.
“I’ll work tirelessly to uphold the requirements of this storied program. There isn’t a higher honor in our sport than to be chosen to steer the U.S. girls in world competitors. I perceive the duty and the challenges that lie forward. I stay up for assembly them head on. This has been one thing I’ve labored in the direction of for a very long time. I’m grateful to the entire gamers that I’ve had the chance to educate and the entire coaches I’ve realized from. There’s nothing extra vital than pushing this group to achieve its potential. I can’t wait to get began!”
Through the introductory press convention that happened on Tuesday, Lawson started her speech itemizing the notable coaches who have been part of the USA Girls’s Nationwide Group all through the years.
Lawson talked about the late Pat Summitt, Van Chancellor, Geno Auriemma, Tara VanDerveer, Daybreak Staley, and Cheryl Reeve.
“What a robust group to hitch,” Lawson stated Tuesday. “That’s why the emotion is effervescent up within me. It’s an incredible, highly effective group that has not solely paved the way in which, however pushed the envelope of ladies’s basketball to the place it’s at present, and helped create the usual and the expectations that everybody that stands up talks about. After they discuss USA Basketball, it’s a particular place, it’s a particular feeling, it’s a particular alternative, and I perceive and really feel that deeply right here at present.”
What Group USA’s 2028 Roster Might Look Like
With elevated curiosity in girls’s basketball over the previous few years, the gamers are in line to make Group USA in 2028 is a scorching subject of dialogue.
Guards Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers, together with forwards Angel Reese and Cameron Brink, are gamers that would earn optimistic evaluations from Chicken and Lawson forward of the 2028 Summer time Olympics. All of those gamers have had experiences with USA Basketball.
Lawson has an excellent teaching resume on the collegiate, skilled, and Olympic ranges, and USA Basketball is optimistic she is prepared for the chance.
The USA Girls’s Nationwide Group is coming off its eighth consecutive gold medal end in Paris final summer season. Their dominance has turned legendary since profitable Gold on the 1996 Summer time Olympics with a staff that featured legends and Corridor of Famers resembling Lisa Leslie, Daybreak Staley, and Sheryl Swoopes.
“After I thought concerning the qualities that we have been going to wish for our head coach, I regarded for somebody who understood the expertise of getting USA on their chest,” Chicken stated throughout introductory press convention Tuesday. “In Kara (Lawson)’s case, it got here within the type of a jersey in addition to a polo. With the 13 gold medals that she has gained as each a coach and a participant, her worldwide expertise is unmatched, and her skill and the proof that she has proven to win on these huge levels your journey, Kara has completely positioned and ready you for this second.”
Lawson will assume Cheryl Reeve‘s function as head coach of the USA Girls’s Nationwide Group and can first lead the unit in to the 2026 Girls’s World Cup in Berlin after which the 2028 Summer time Olympic Video games in Los Angeles.
