New Duke women's basketball coach Kara Lawson announced the hiring of three assistants Friday, including longtime former Notre Dame assistant Beth Cunningham.
Also on the staff will be Tia Jackson, who previously was an assistant at Duke for Gail Goestenkors and has spent the last five years at Miami, and Winston Gandy, who has been at Rice for three seasons.
Lawson, a former Tennessee player who spent the past year as an assistant with the NBA's Boston Celtics, was hired by Duke on July 11. This is her first college coaching job, and she had previously said experience would be one of the biggest things she would look for in assistants.
Cunningham and Jackson both are coming to Duke from other ACC schools and have been coaching for the past two decades.
As a player, Cunningham, then known as Beth Morgan, helped lead Notre Dame to its first Women's Final Four in 1997. After playing professionally, she began as an assistant coach at Virginia Commonwealth in 2001 before becoming head coach two years later and staying in that role until 2012.
She returned to her alma mater in 2012 as an assistant to Muffet McGraw and was a part of the 2018 national championship team among her five Final Four appearances with the Irish. When McGraw retired in April, Cunningham was not retained by new coach Niele Ivey, who also had been on McGraw's staff from 2007 to 2019.
Jackson also went to the Women's Final Four as a player, with Iowa in 1993. After a season in the WNBA, she entered coaching. Since 1996, she has been an assistant at six different programs, along with being head coach at Washington from 2007 to 2011. Her previous stint at Duke was from 2005 to 2007, which included a 2006 national runner-up finish.
Gandy helped the Owls to a 72-22 overall record and a 42-8 mark in Conference USA the past three seasons. Before that, he was coordinator of player development for the NBA's Washington Wizards for three years.