GT Women, Blair looking forward to ACC Tournament

The postseason has arrived for first-year Georgia Tech head coach Karen Blair and her team as the Yellow Jackets open ACC Tournament play on Wednesday as the No. 11 seed at Gas South Arena just up the road in Duluth.

After a season of steady improvement, Blair and her squad are ready to show even more this week starting with a first-round matchup at 4 p.m. on Wednesday vs. No. 14 seed Florida State, a team the Jackets defeated 80-69 back on Jan. 25 in Tallahassee.

With tournament play on deck, Blair met with the media on Monday during the ACC Coaches Zoom Call to discuss several subjects, including the excitement level as her team embarks on her first ACC Tournament, the progress she has made in her first season at the helm along with her team’s improvement, playing close to home and hopefully having a lot of local fan support and more.

Here’s some of what she had to say:

Blair on looking forward to the ACC Tournament ahead…

Blair: “Yeah, I mean welcome to March, right? We finally made it to the the third season where everybody kind of comes into this 0-0. But really excited. I mean we’re excited for us just being in Duluth, just northeast of where we’re at here in Georgia Tech. So we’re happy to be home…just one thing that we’re hoping to continue this week…we’ve been really good at home this year and so we’re just going to try and make this extension of home as we go up into this ACC tournament. But I just can’t say enough about the way our team is playing. You look at Talayah Walker right now, and and she’s just scoring the ball at such an extreme level. Then you look at Snoop (Brianna) Turnage, the way that she’s rebounding the ball. Our team has just found a way to collectively play together, I think, in these last five or six games. We’ve been able to get a little bit more of a flow on the offensive end, sharing the ball more, getting out in our transition game. But you know the identity of this team has always been the defense and the rebounding. That’s what we’re going to hang our hats on. It’s what we’ve been able to do. So I look forward to you these games ahead.”

Blair on Turnage’s impact with her rebounding and overall game…

Blair: “You know, there’s just some players that just have a knack for rebounding. I think she just tracks the ball, but she also studies it. This is what a lot of people don’t know. I mean she spends time…she’ll rebound for her teammates, and she starts to learn her teammates really well. And she even watches film if she knows like certain matchups on the opponent’s team, who are the three people that take the ball and she’s able to do that. Most shots do they miss short or is it usually long? So I mean she actually studies the game to a really extreme high level. I think that’s what helps her to be able to track those rebounds, and I’ll tell you this, our staff, we’re enjoying every single minute of it. I mean you talk about her having back-to-back 20 rebound games, a game with 21. She’s had multiple games with 18 rebounds…it’s been amazing to watch. It’s what makes our defense so good, and she’s able to get those defensive rebounds and be able to lead our break. So just really proud of her. I see that as the season’s going on, she just is playing with such confidence and joy and that’s what you want from your seniors. You want your seniors to be playing their best basketball, to play with that freedom. She knows she’s got it. She’s got the freedom within our system to make plays go.”

Blair on the confidence her team has going into the tournament after competing with and beating some of the top teams in the ACC this year…

Blair: “I think that’s the biggest thing with this group. The one thing I’ve loved about them is they’ve just always been steady. They don’t get too high. They don’t get too low. They have a lot of confidence. We’re able to make our own runs. We’re able to withstand some runs, and so I think when you get into March you know you’ve got to be able to have those experiences…have you gone into overtime games. You know, what have you seen? And I think that’s the thing with the ACC at this point. You’ve been kind of prepared. You’ve seen a lot of different zones, a lot of different presses, and I think we’ve just continued to grow and get better. And what I’ve loved about this team is we started to play our best basketball going into February and probably these last three games. We had two games where we had too many turnovers, but I thought (Sunday) against Miami we took care of the basketball and that was the difference in maybe us winning or losing a couple of those other games So for us that has to continue to be successful. We’ve got to value our possessions.”

Blair on Tech’s fan support and that carrying over into the Tournament…

Blair: “I mean it’s been great. We’ve had this year at Georgia Tech some of the best crowds we’ve ever had in this program’s history so there is a you know a lot of ‘buzz’ as we like to say here at Georgia Tech. But the thing about this this team is a lot of people have been able to get behind them because they work really hard. If you talk about just the blue-collar work ethic…they play the game very hard, they’re very high energy, they play for each other. So I think that’s the best compliment our staff and everybody we continue to get from the community, from the high school coaches, from the AAU coaches, is just how connected this group is and how hard they play. So for us that’s what I said…we’ve been really, really good at home. I mean you look at our defense. We’ve been able to defend the 3 really well at home, and that’s what’s been able to keep us in games. So we’re going to just travel that 30 miles north. We’re going to make sure that that defense travels with us as we get into this ACC tournament. But we’re going to treat this like home and it’s been a good response from our fans, from our donors. I know a lot of people are excited to come out. Again, Atlanta’s a sports town so I know that everybody’s going to show out. They’re going to come out here and support the ACC because you talk about the premier conference of basketball. It’s going to be a lot of fun, a lot of fun top-tier teams that are going to be competing against each other. Every single night in the ACC it’s it’s been a battle so I expect this tournament to be a lot of fun.”

Blair on how she has changed and grown over her first season as a head coach…

Blair: “That’s a great question. You know, I think for me one of the things like early on as an assistant you always go into a program and you have all these ideas of things you’re going to run and things that you’re going to do. And I think I learned early in November as we started to have a lot of injuries that mounted up, it became very clear to me that I was going to have to keep things simple. So I think that was always the challenge. I think sometimes as coaches we maybe we want to over-coach or we’ve got all these great ideas…so that discipline, that self-discipline, to be very honest with you to be able to just try and keep things really simple. Our mantra was like let’s get really good at just a couple things instead of trying to just be good at many things. I think that was, as you kind of saw as we moved into 2026 after Christmas, it started to pay the dividends. We were really specific in our roles. We got really good you know icing ball screens and our man coverages, and then now as we’ve kind of got into January, we’ve been able to slowly start adding some zone into our games to be able to help us change some things. So sometimes I think that’s hard, but that was, for me, was that discipline piece of being like ‘yeah, you know this playbook was great but guess what? None of these things are going to come in this year.’ But what I’ve learned from that is like now as we go into next summer obviously there’s some cornerstones of things that I know that we’ll be able to put in early and implement early that will carry over through our program, and it’s been a big piece. It’s like I said, I love rebounding so what a blessing that I was able to have somebody like Snoop in this first year because it’s like everybody says, they want to play fast but if you can’t rebound to finish possessions then you can’t play fast. And so Snoop has has given us that, and everybody has bought into it. I still think there’s another level to the pace that we’ll want to play, but for this group they have they’ve done a great job.”

Blair on Talayah Walker’s scoring and impact on the team…

Blair: “I have loved watching Talayah’s growth. If you guys knew only at the beginning of the year when you have like your first meetings with Talayah, (she) is just like the most genuine and happy person, and she’s just happy to be part of the team. Talayah was like ‘I’m just I’m happy to be here. Just tell me what you need me to do.’ And then to watch her and I think we all saw like in that Notre Dame game it was the first time she looked at me and was like ‘Coach, give me the ball.’ And I knew at that moment that we had our go-to player, and we were looking for somebody to do that. Talayah has been so solid…you talk about every single day in practice. She comes in, she gets shots up early. She’ll stay (after). Like this kid has just dedicated herself to being a premier player. So we were saying yesterday, I was just so proud of her. It’s like early in conference, she had to learn she was being face guarded, how was she going to counter that. Then we worked a lot on her post-up game and so then she was starting to be really dominant in the post. But she loved to be able to see…I’m still trying to get to (her) to shoot more 3 . You guys, I promise she knows that she has a green light to be able to shoot it. I mean the last five games there’s a lot of things there…she’s working hard on her mid-range game, how to, when she gets into heavy gaps how to deliver the ball a little bit sooner. So her passing’s gotten better, just her overall game. She just continues to improve, but she puts the time in. And that’s what you know…when your best player is your hardest worker, good things happen.”

Blair on her team’s unselfishness and high number of assists…

Blair: “I mean you can look at our stats and you see how our assists are distributed. I can’t say enough about Erica Moon‘s growth either as a point guard. Erica’s had to take on a lot of PG minutes for us and to watch her grow, her play-calling ability as we’ve gone through these last couple months like we’ve got to go, Erica goes, and she knows that. Then we have two of the most unselfish post players in Snoop and Ari (Ariadna) Termis. Those guys become our playmakers. We have our guards that can post up with (La’Nya Foster) and Talayah and Savannah (Samuel). Then you have these amazing post players that are so unselfish that they become these playmakers for them and willing to do the screening, the dirty work, the defense, the rebounding. I tell them…I tell our guards all the time, I said ‘you guys don’t know how lucky you are that you have post players that are willing to do all the dirty work.’ And you know at the end of the day, they just want to get more assists than they want to get buckets. But this is kind of who we have been from the beginning. Early in the non-conference, we had this time period where maybe we were passing too much and not looking for our shots so that’s where we had our ‘let it fly period’ from the Thanksgiving tournament where we had to learn how to want to shoot it, to find open shots. Those were good shots and then as it kind of transpired after that. Then we worked on some shot selection, but the ball movement has always been who this team has been.”