Duke's Lindsey Harding Goes From WNBA Player to NBA Coach

When Lindsey Harding arrived at Duke in 2002, it was an intimidating environment.

“I was there with the greatest to ever play at Duke,” she said while appearing in a panel discussion with other coaches at the fourth annual Junior NBA Leadership Conference. “Alana Beard—We had a player who was All-American and would dive on floor for the ball every time. I came in as a freshman and said, ‘Okay, this is the level.’”

She tried to defer to her older, more accomplished teammates, but since she was supposed to be running the team, that wasn’t going to work, as coach Gail Goestenkors tried to emphasize.

“I came in as a point guard who wouldn’t say anything,” she said. “I was quiet. She probably doesn’t remember this, but she would say, ‘When we’re in practice,’ which was three hours back then, maybe three and a half hours. ‘If I hear silence out of you, if you’re not saying anything, if I turn around and you’re not saying anything, you have to run two suicides, back-to-back.’ Nothing’s happening on the court. They’re just dribbling the ball down the court, and she’s like, ‘Harding, why are you not talking? Run.’ I would start saying, ‘Good job! Go! Run!’ I would make things up. But that forced me to communicate. To talk. Then I started talking through plays. Then I started leading. Then she couldn’t shut me up. It took me awhile.”

Harding credits Goestenkors with being the most influential person in her career.

“She pushed me,” Harding said. “I always worked hard, but she pushed me past that limit. I didn’t know I could go any further, but the whole team was like that.”

Coach G obviously saw something in her young point guard.

“She taught me so much,” Harding said. “She was the first person who told me, ‘You know what? You’d be a great coach, someday.’ I told her she was crazy. I’m never gonna do this. I never planned to do this. But she put it in my head. When I retired a couple years ago and started moving in this direction, I remembered her telling me.”

Now, Harding is coaching at the highest level of the sport. Last year, she was hired by the NBA’s Sacramento Kings as the Player Development Coach. She’s one of the first women to get a coaching job in the NBA, which takes a certain touch.

“It’s a collaborative approach,” she said. I never come in and say, ‘You have to do this, this and this.’ It’s, ‘This is what’s expected. This is what we’re going to look to you for. Let’s get together. What do you want to work on? Sometimes, you have to give a little bit. We try to move as one. Coming in and saying, ‘You do this,’ especially at this level, the NBA …some guys may fight it a little bit. Having a collaborative approach has been the best bet.”