Head Coach Ganiyat “Coach G” Adeduntan’s hiring marks a reset for women’s basketball.
Entering her first full season as head coach, Adeduntan has taken the reins of a program that finished 13-18, 5-13 in the Atlantic 10 last season and endured an eight-game losing streak before former head coach Caroline McCombs stepped down mid season. Between a culture revamp, staffing alterations and her overall coaching IQ, Adeduntan has already started trying to alleviate the dysfunction she inherited in March — a necessary and important step. Still, even as she addresses immediate issues, maintaining a long-term vision will be crucial to sustained success.
Adeduntan has the resume to prove she can pull off such a turnaround. Before returning to Foggy Bottom, she led a Colgate University team that saw two 20-win campaigns and the program’s first back-to-back WNIT appearance, also overseeing a 17-win improvement over her first two seasons with the Raiders. The team’s record did a dizzying 180, moving from 6-24 to 23-10 between 2021 and 2024. It takes coaches years to build out programs, add talent and achieve winning records, and Adeduntan did it unbelievably quickly with the Raiders.
Still, it’s not just her record at Colgate that stands out — it’s how quickly and decisively she turned a struggling program into a contender, a model for the rest of women’s basketball to follow. Now, GW needs Adeduntan to bring that same success to its own program.
But the question looms: Is it replicable at GW? Her rebuilding approach will be tested in a higher-pressure A-10 conference. I hope her methods are effective in this new environment and are not drowned out in a more competitive league, and I think it’s possible if she remains committed to culture and balances it with aggressive recruiting to find talented players.
After beginning in March, Adeduntan took the important step of overhauling the team’s staff, scooping Assistant Coach Brianna Finch from Boston University who brings her 18 years of offensive strategy and consecutive 20-win seasons to GW — expertise the Revs desperately need after the team ranked 11th out of 15 in the A-10 offensively last season. Adeduntan is obviously aware of this struggle, also recruiting Assistant Coaches Macey Hollenshead and Lauren Coleman from her staff at Colgate to maintain some leadership continuity.
The roster needs remodeling, too. Adeduntan must build more cohesive rotations and fit pieces of her roster together strategically, which will help the players gel together. McCombs had a pattern of implementing constantly changing lineups and seemingly randomized playing time that caused discombobulation on the court, which was a big reason the team struggled down the stretch.
With new players and a new system, returning sophomore Gabby Reynolds and junior Sara Lewis will be strong pieces that Adeduntan must build around. Reynolds boasts A-10 All-Rookie honors as a consistent offensive and defensive contributor for the Revs. She scored in double figures 14 times during her rookie season, including 12 times in A-10 play, making her second on the team in scoring last season, averaging 10.5 points per game. Lewis’ experience and stats will boost the team, given she averaged 5.5 boards per game last season while shooting from a .330 clip. While not extraordinary, Lewis’ consistency doesn’t harm the team and is needed to stabilize the roster.
As a part of her work on the roster, Adeduntan brought in graduate guard Nya Morris from Claflin University, a 43.8 percent shooter from behind the arc, which should help address GW’s 27.1 percent team 3-point average that lands them 12th in the A-10.
Still, while it appears the team is making strides in the right direction with its coaching staff and roster, those improvements are only part of the challenge Adeduntan faces. Perhaps the most pressing issue will be navigating the competition within a transforming NCAA landscape. The A-10 remains a highly competitive conference — often a two-bid league for the Big Dance — and evolving factors such as NIL policies, transfer eligibility and new revenue models have fundamentally reshaped the dynamics of college basketball.
While GW stays on the heels of these changes, there is only so much leverage a mid-major program has — especially a losing one, as it stands. Director of Athletics Michael Lipitz aims for GW to be a competitive team every year. The emphasis on basketball from University President Ellen Granberg and Lipitz echoes the energy of the late nineties, when GW made five NCAA tournament appearances in six years, and is something Adeduntan must do her part to work towards.
On the court, Adeduntan’s style is centered on holistic development: emotional wellness, academic success and personal accountability as pillars of her leadership. While I appreciate the focus on culture, in today’s money-driven NCAA, it only goes so far in recruiting and retaining talented players. I worry about this culture-first approach and fear it isn’t enough to immunize GW against the transactional, name-image-likeness-driven team building in the NCAA. While fostering a better culture and promoting overall well-being is optimal for a healthy program, this alone will not pin down success-hungry players in the current college basketball environment.
Adeduntan’s trend of upward mobility, empathy-driven leadership and understanding of institutional goals is a foundation for long-term progress. But she must prove she can restore the program’s success and spirit and do so quickly, given how the past few years have looked. The coming season will determine whether GW’s next era begins with Adeduntan.
