Adia Barnes named court coach for USA Women’s National Team spring training camp

One way or another, Arizona head coach Adia Barnes will be in Minneapolis in late March and early April. If the Wildcats are in the Final Four for the second straight year, she will be coaching her team at the highest level of women’s college basketball. If the Wildcats don’t advance that far, Barnes will be in Minneapolis from March 30 through April 2 taking part in spring training camp as a court coach for the USA Women’s National Team.

It is the second straight year that Barnes will be part of USA Basketball’s coaching pool. Last year, she was an assistant coach for the USA AmeriCup gold medal team.

“It’s such an honor to represent the United States as a USA Basketball coaching staff member and I sincerely thank the committee for selecting me as a court coach for the 2022 national team training camp,” Barnes said in a press release. “To be surrounded by the best basketball players in the world and absorb the basketball knowledge from those fellow coaches and players is a tremendous opportunity. As an assistant coach a year ago on the USA AmeriCup gold medal team, I experienced my first opportunity with coaching the USA in an international setting and the work was incredibly rewarding and I loved everything about it.”

Barnes joins Duke’s Kara Lawson, Georgia’s Joni Taylor, and Louisville’s Jeff Walz as court coaches for the minicamp. All but Lawson have teams in the NCAA Tournament.

The group will work under head coach Cheryl Reeve of the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx. It will be the second time that Reeve has worked with the group of hopefuls ahead of the 2022 World Cup.

The coaching staff was chosen by the USA Basketball Women’s National Team Committee which consists of former USA National Team assistant coach Jennifer Rizzotti, former USA National Team head coach Dawn Staley, WNBA head of league operations Bethany Donaphin, and former World Cup and Olympic gold medalists Seimone Augustus and DeLisha Milton-Jones.