Coach Karen Blair aims to showcase fast team in 1st season with Georgia Tech

The past few months have gone by as fast as Karen Blair wants her first Georgia Tech team to play.

Hired in April, Blair has had half a year to assemble a staff and piece together a roster for her maiden voyage as the coach of Tech women’s basketball.

“They say it’s like drinking from a fire hose,” Blair said in September. “We have to come in and hire an entire staff and then put together a roster. It’s like, some things you just have to go through for the first time. I feel like I was able to put together a staff, and that’s most important as a head coach, is you’ve got to put people behind you that you know that you can rely on and you can count on. We’ve done that, and I think we were really intentional.

“I wanted the personalities of players who love the game. One of my core values is you have to play this game with joy and passion. It has to be everything that we do, and that doesn’t mean that we’re not going to have hard days. We’ll have hard days, but basketball is fun.”

Blair takes over a program that in many ways will be unrecognizable.

Tech’s 2024-25 team, coached by Nell Fortner, went 22-11 and lost to Richmond in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. The stars on that team — Dani Carnegie, Tonie Morgan, Chazadi Wright and Kara Dunn — were part of a mass exodus of players who transferred after Fortner retired.

Only center Ariadna Termis, guard Ines Noguero and forward D’Asia Thomas-Harris stayed to play for Blair, a first-time head coach making an annual salary of $325,000 in the first year of a five-year contract. Blair said integrating everyone, staff and players alike, into the culture she wants is of utmost importance.

“What culture is are habits, right? It is how we do things every day, how we go about our processes, and that’s what we’ve really tried to do,” she added. “We’ve set this really high standard for ourselves. It starts with work ethic.

“We feel really fortunate right now that is the culture that we have, the players that we brought in, they want to be developed. They want to get to the gym. They’re watching film with us. So that’s all we can ask for as a coaching staff. You get those players that are humble and hungry, and have that pride in Georgia Tech. It’s a pleasure to work with them every single day.”

Of Tech’s eight incoming transfers, five are upperclassmen and include St. Francis High School graduate Savannah Samuel (Boston College), Westlake graduate Brianna Turnage (Florida State), Grayson graduate Catharine Alben (Charleston Southern) and Lovejoy graduate La’Nya Foster (Austin Peay). Blair signed only two freshmen to her first squad.

Blair, a former Southern Methodist point guard who came to Tech from Maryland, also hired four new assistant coaches to help install her systems on the court.

“We’re going to be able to play at a really fast pace. That’s what our intention is,” she said. “Coming in and being able to play that up-tempo style and try to put a lot of points on the board, that’s what we want to do here at Georgia Tech.”