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BIRMINGHAM, Alab. — Before every game, Duke guard Reigan Richardson meets with her coach, Kara Lawson, for a brief conversation.The senior guard has been one of Lawson’s best players since she arrived on campus in 2022, after spending one season at Georgia. Richardson led Duke in scoring last season and, through the first two months of the season, was hitting her 12.4 average, again.
But the last few months, her shot has been off and that can fluster Richardson. But the meetings with Lawson helped center her.
They chat about the game and then Lawson checks on her mindset going into each game, helping to remind the North Carolina native the type of player she is.
“She keeps me focused and calm going into games,” Richardson, who had three points, but seven rebounds in Duke’s 47-38 Sweet 16 win over North Carolina on Friday. “Knowing she believes in me and trusts in me, it helps me going into games.”
Lawson has a lot of strengths as a coach, bringing her experience as a former Tennessee great and WNBA All-Star who previously coached as an NBA assistant before joining Duke in 2020. Her players say her calm demeanor and ability to instill confidence in them makes the difference that has the Blue Devils in their first Elite Eight since 2013.
When North Carolina jumped out to an 11-0 lead in the first six minutes of Friday’s Sweet 16 game, Lawson brought players to the bench during a media timeout to deliver a simple message: “Do ya’ll. The shots will fall.”
The shots did, in fact, fall. Duke outscored North Carolina 47-27 after the first six minutes. “Hearing that, it was key for us,” guard Ashlon Jackson said.
When Lawson was hired in 2020, she knew she was in for an uphill battle to rebuild a Duke program that was struggling to just be competitive. That was her first goal, but COVID-19 ended her first season early, so she got to work recruiting.
The problem with recruiting, especially as a new coach, is that she had no barometer of success that she could pitch to the players. She had her résumé, which included being an Olympic Gold medalist, a WNBA champion and winning the 2003 Naismith Award at Tennessee, but as she talked to Jackson, standout freshman Toby Fournier and others, she kept pitching that Duke was going to be good. They just had to believe.
“We targeted young, high school players that we felt fit who we wanted to be,” Lawson said. “We knew we weren’t very good right then, but who did we want to be? We tried to sell some of the top talent in the country that we would be good at some point.”
They believed in Lawson, but it wasn’t because of what she was saying, it was what they saw behind the scenes.
Fournier, a freshman and Duke’s leading scorer, is from Canada so she wanted to find a place that could make her comfortable in a new country. The No. 10 ranked player in the 2025 class found that right away with Lawson.
“I knew I could trust Coach Kara,” Fournier said. “She’s a very straight forward person, it was good because I knew she would never tell me a lie. She’s going to tell you exactly how it is.”
Richardson, who committed to a Duke team that hadn’t even made the tournament yet, saw the same thing.
“When I saw how connected the team was, that brought me here,” Richardson said. “I wanted to find a place that was my second home.”
Lawson doesn’t show a lot of emotion in front of the media and described herself as boring after Duke’s win, but for as much as she focuses on the basketball details, she does the same when it comes to bonding with her team.
Of all the things she learned from legendary coach Pat Summit, that is most important, she said.
“The thing that I felt was one of her superpowers was her ability to connect with her players and her ability to really get in there with them, get in the struggle with them,” Lawson said. “Stay in the struggle with them and work to help them get out of it. You know, not just tell them what to do, but be in there with them, instructing them. So that’s something that I think I’ve grown in.”
In the transfer portal era, that’s paid off for Lawson, who played eight players for at least 10 minutes against UNC. Her ability to keep talent and get the most out of her bench comes from that connection.
Duke is rarely out of a game, not because it’s an elite offensive team, but because they play strong defense and never believe the game is over. Last year, in the second round win at No. 2 seed Ohio State, the Blue Devils trailed by 15 midway through the second quarter before a double-digit comeback victory.
It’s no coincidence that it happened again in this year’s tournament.
Duke isn’t flashy. It doesn’t have a Player of the Year candidate, and it isn’t going to garner national attention with its style of play.
But Friday’s Sweet 16 win has reinforced one thing that Lawson said she always knew: “I’m built for this. … I’m built to do this at a high level.”
And she has Duke one game away from its first Final Four since 2006.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Duke Blue Devils, Women's College Basketball, Women's NCAA Tournament
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