Duke coach Kara Lawson said the teams played with a men’s basketball for the first half of a loss to Florida State on Sunday.
The 16th-ranked Blue Devils lost to the Seminoles 70-57 in Tallahassee, Florida — the team’s second Atlantic Coast Conference loss of the season.
After her team beat Pittsburgh 53-44 on Thursday, Lawson ended her news conference by speaking animatedly about Sunday’s game.
“This would never happen in a men’s game. This would never happen,” she said. “It’s embarrassing for our sport.”
The circumference of a women’s ball is about an inch smaller than a men’s ball, and it is typically 2 ounces lighter. While it might not seem like a lot, that’s a big difference.
Lawson said that throughout the first half, Duke players were “complaining about the ball.” The Blue Devils were 7-for-34 from the field in the opening 20 minutes of that game. They were 12-for-38 in the second half. Florida State made 10 of its 30 shots in the first two quarters and 14 of 31 in the second half.
“To have a game that, at the end of the season, could be the difference between a seed, between a title, my players don’t deserve that and neither do their players,” Lawson said. “It’s a complete failure. And you can figure out who the people I’m talking about that failed…
