PODCAST: Previewing LSU women's basketball with Gary Redus
LSU women’s basketball begins its season with an exhibition game on Thursday night in the PMAC and with that, we ramp up our preview for this year’s team as the No. 5 ranked team in the country. Kim Mulkey has built another talented team in Baton Rouge, but assistant coach Gary Redus plays a huge part in creating that roster and joined Matthew Brune to talk about LSU’s team, recruiting, and much more as we enter the season.
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On the pod: LSU women’s basketball
On Zakiyah Johnson…
“ZaKiyah was a phenom early on, like, seventh, eighth grade. She was playing 17U, and she was playing the post. Her nickname was, like, Z The Beast back then, or something like that. I don’t know. She all summer. All summer, she was in she was in me and Simone’s position group. She was in our workouts. She worked out as a wing the entire time, and a good wing. I mean, she was a good wing player. We were excited about it. We knew that we could use another body up front, but we were gonna make it work. We felt good about our post group, honestly. In our last workout, our last workout of the summer, one of the post players had already left to go home, and we needed someone to play the four because we were kind of going, just kind of going through some stuff. We put her at the four she was amazing. She was amazing that day. It was her best day of the entire summer. And I think that there’s just a comfort level that she has in tight spaces. In tight spaces, she can contort her body in just a very awkward way. And like you said, she has a quickness, and it’s very easy for her to use her quickness in the paint, and a lot of people can’t do that. I hate to say that she’s like a mold. She’s in that mold of Yes, Nina Davis and like Aneesah Morrow, to where she just can move. She’s smaller, but you can’t really tell, because of her activity level, she’s not the rebounder that Aneesah is, but, but she just finds a way around the rim, similar to Aneesah.”
On Flau’Jae Johnson and Mikaylah Williams…
“The main thing for both of them is to lead this team and do what this team needs them to do. We know they can score and some nights it will be to score, but it’s leading the team. That’s so much more and it plays such a bigger role. We have a lot of players who can score. We have a lot of talent on this team. What we don’t have is a lot of leadership and they’ve been here. They know what it takes. They know what the expectation is. We need them every single day at practice to be in control of our team and to make sure everyone is doing what they’re supposed to be doing at all times. It’s tough but that’s something championship teams have. We expect a lot out of them. They have to not only play great, but also everyone else is playing to the level as well. This year, we’re going to go as far as they lead us to go. Not just with scoring points. Everybody knows they’re good players. Everyone knows they’re going to be All-SEC and All-American players, but the next step for both of them is leading. Leading also means knowing when I need to step it up. When I need to get this person involved. For them, that’s the next step and we’re excited to see it.”