Angela Lawson
Head Women's Basketball Coach
Phone: 829-3827
Email:
lawson@uiwtx.edu
A pattern has come forth for Incarnate Word teams coached by Angela Lawson. And it is one of winning basketball games.
Don’t misunderstand. It all has not been rosey as she heads into her ninth year as the Cardinals head person. There have been some downs, like, her very first season back in 2000-2201. With a decimated squad from the year before UIW won six games. The next year they won 11 and then began the pattern of winning with three consecutive seasons of reaching the Heartland Conference championship tournament, twice all the way to the finals.
Then another not-so-memorable year of nine wins followed by two more winning seasons and trips to the Heartland event, once to the finals. That includes last year, 2007-2008, when Lawson’s squad won 17 contests.
That made it three of the last four years for the Cardinals to advance to the finals of the Heartland tournament, one step short of a trip to the NCAA Division II national tournament.
A year ago, the fall of 2007, the Cardinals were slow-starting to say the least. The team was 2-7 headed for the New Year’s break when they won two games the last two days of December. That started a roll of six consecutive wins and 11 victories in 12 tries and the Cardinals were headed for the Heartland tournament again.
This year, Coach Lawson says there is a positive atmosphere present. But almost always she says that because that is the way Coach Lawson is. She expects to win and she conveys that to her teams. But over and above that, there is a sense she likes the 2008-2009 version of the Cardinals with the combination of returning players and the infusion of new talent.
That said, the coach will tell you how she vividly remembers her first year at UIW and the pain of winning but six games with a team she inherited too late in the recruiting season to do much good. And that is an experience she carries around to keep things level when the optimism reigns.
On the academic side of the student-athlete, he team's graduation rate remains high, the cumulative grade point average continues to be above the 'B' or 3.0 level, and with the wins coming in greater quantities on the court. The sure hand of Angela Lawson is present and evident.
This coach knows a thing or three or four about success and how to get there.
A native of Longview in the Texas Piney Woods area, she was an all-state selection and an All-American pick from a team which won the Texas state 5A title. That same year she was the state tournament MVP and was named Texas Miss Basketball.
During her high school days, while determined to get a college scholarship to play more basketball, she recalls spending every summer in the hot, un-air-conditioned gym playing with the guys who she convinced to teach her how to shoot the jump shot.
She was recruited heavily by colleges across the nation, but Louisiana Tech, in her backyard, had the advantage and that's where she landed just two hours away in Ruston, La. The Lady Techsters had won national titles and nothing would change when A. Lawson arrived. A three-year starter, Angela and La Tech won an NCAA title in 1988, her senior year.
Always intending to be a coach, she took her education northward to another haven of women's hoops, the University of Tennessee. Two years in Knoxville as a graduate assistant earned her a master's degree. And guess what? The Lady Vols won a national title the second year.
Now, more about her coaching days. It was three years as an assistant at Southwest Texas State, then six years at Baylor. Then came her turn as a head person when Incarnate Word came calling in the spring of 2000. Incarnate Word, she said at the time, "is absolutely the right place for me to start my head coaching career."
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