CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Duke coach Kara Lawson said Monday at ACC Tipoff that coaching Team USA to gold in the World Cup over the summer made her a better coach, an experience she has used to help her team navigate a new season filled with higher expectations and more pressure to win.
"You want to be in that situation," Lawson told ESPN. "You want to be sitting before a season or before a tournament as one of the favorites to win it. I just can't imagine that you'd want to be anywhere else. So, I talk about it through that lens. It's where we want to be. We want to have high expectations. We want to be a team that's considered one of the best. If you have a competitive will, that's what you live for."
Winning the gold medal in Berlin certainly was not easy. Team USA had two days of practice together before the tournament started and then faced a double-digit deficit to France in the gold medal game before winning 97-79. Lawson faced criticism at times for the player rotations she used, but she said her candid conversations with the players on the team allowed for communication to always be open.
"Our whole staff -- not just me -- we tried to put our team in the best position to win," Lawson said. "So I'm proud of how we played, and I'm proud of how they all bought into that, to put us in that position to win gold."
There is obvious pressure that comes with being the national team coach, as the expectation is to win gold. Team USA has now won five straight women's World Cup titles. Now with her own team, there is pressure to win, too.
Duke has won back-to-back ACC tournament titles, made it to two straight Elite Eights and returns one of the top teams in the country with Toby Fournier leading the way. But simply getting to the Final Four is not the end goal. Lawson said every move she has made since she became the head coach in 2020 was to win a national championship with the Blue Devils.
"The Final Four is not the line of demarcation for me," Lawson said. "It's a national championship. People will say, 'Well, you're one game short.' Well, we're three short. Our goal is to put ourselves in position to be playing our best in March, and put ourselves in position to have a deep run. But I am not the person that if we had won one more game and then lost, that would have said, 'Oh, my life is complete.' We want to win.
"We're inching closer to that, but at the same time, we're still away from it. Winning three more is a lot. It's hard to win those games. So it's a significant challenge. There's a lot of teams that are going to be in that group but I'm hopeful we're one of those teams in that conversation when we get into March."