'We are becoming': Joni Taylor ready for first season guiding the Aggies

The official start of the Joni Taylor era in College Station is less than a month away as the Maroon & White gear up for the 2022-23 season. Ahead of SEC Media Days, Taylor sat down to discuss her whirlwind summer, getting adjusted to Aggieland and much more.

Key notes from Joni Taylor interview

• Let me give you this timeline: I got the job on March 23. I was here through that weekend to meet some point, and then I flew back to Georgia to pack a bag and go to the Final Four. I was there for a week, and then I went to Georgia to pack another back to fly back to College Station around April 5. We had recruiting weekends and official visits and trying to sign players. There was a period time where I was settled for about a week, and then my family moved to Texas on April 29. I left on May 30 to go to Colorado Springs for USA Basketball for my stint as the U18 head coach. Training camp was May 30-June 2. On June 3, we left to go to Argentina to compete for the championships. We won that, which was really cool. I was gone until June 22. I was home for a week before I hit the road for recruiting in July. I went to Hungary somewhere in there to recruit the U17 team that was playing. August was a pretty chill month, and I got settled a little bit. I’ve been fortunate enough to be an assistant coach for the USA National Team, which is our Olympic team. We left on Sept. 5, and I got back on Oct. 2. We were in training camp in Vegas before we went to Australia, so I’ve been ‘down under’ for the last week weeks.
   
• We got here on a Wednesday, and we had an official visit come in the next night. Most of our staff came with us from Georgia, so they know how we like to do things and how we operate. Everyone here was very helpful in helping us figure it out. The first campus tour I gave, I was taking the tour myself, and that’s where Christina Richardson was A-one for us in holding it down and helping us learn the ropes as quickly as she could teach it to us. She was throwing us into the first as to what the traditions were and learning as best we could everything about Texas A&M and College Station. I have great people around me, and you just take it one day at a time.
   
• In my opinion, to be asked to serve your country in the way of representing USA Basketball, it’s just a really high honor. This is our way of serving our country. With USA Basketball, there is a standard of excellence in which you are operating in from the top down. It is consistent, and that’s why we’re so successful. It comes down to who you are. If talent is the same but you were late to the bus one day and the other young lady wasn’t, guess who is making that team. It hardly ever comes down to talent at the junior national level. When you get to the national level, it’s a high level of talent when you’re talking about the Olympic team. We have players on our team that are competing right now who want to continue to be a part of USA Basketball. Janiah Barker has competed with USA Basketball on two separate occasions with 3-on-3 and 5-on-5. That’s what she wants to do, and there are others who want to as well. It’s really good for me to show them what it looks like. Some players want to make the national team and want to be Olympians. We want to recruit young ladies who have those goals in mind. To be able to say what it looks like from a basketball standpoint and a nutrition, taking care of your body, sleep and recovery standpoint; those things jump off the page of why USA Basketball players have the longevity that they do in the league. There are seven players on our team of 12 that are playing in the WNBA Finals. You can sell them on being a professional and showing them what it looks like.
   
• Sometimes, we say things that we want to do without a true understanding of what it takes. When it comes to being an elite basketball player, if that’s truly what you want to do, I can tell players what it looks like. It’s really good to be able to explain to players the sacrifice. Players on the Las Vegas Aces team were talking about skipping their championship parade in order to make it to Australia. That’s sacrifice.
   
• Being gone so much this summer was difficult because I want to be here. I’m a new coach that is learning new young ladies for the first time, and I want to be available for them as our staff makes themselves available to them as well. It has been easy because when we are here as a complete staff, we spend a ton of time with them. You know this is happening, so leading up to me leaving in May, we were constantly trying to do team-bonding stuff at the end of April and taking them to lunch and spending time with them. We did the same thing in August. A lot of players were gone because it was a break before school started, but I was able to see them and spend time with them. They’re in team group chats, and we’re constantly communicating that way. FaceTime makes a lot of things easier too. I’m really confident that when I left the second time that the message of who we want to be and become was very clear. Our staff has been together for a long time, so that helps too. I was able to sleep easy at night, but the biggest thing was being on a 14-hour time difference. I’m a morning person anyways, so I would wake up at 4 a.m. in Australia, which would be 1 p.m. the day before in College Station. I would wake up and have Zoom meetings with staff and stuff just so I could do things well. I was going to wake up at 4 a.m. no matter what, so we just planned the Zooms for that time.
   
• What I love about our team at Texas A&M is that they have tried to do everything we have asked. We are coming in with a new style of play on both ends of the floor. It’s foreign to them, and to their credit, they have done everything in their power to learn it and embrace it in the way we want it done. We’re asking them to stress themselves academically and serve their community well, so we’re pulling at them from all angles. They are really accepting that responsibility. I love how they are learning each other again and the team energy that is taking shape and forming. We have a lot to work on in terms of who we are becoming. We are the second youngest team in the SEC. When you talk about having a leader, there is no one on our roster that has played for us, so you’re essentially teaching 11 freshmen. The system is brand new. It’s a big learning curve. The good news is that everyone has the same shot because it’s new for everybody. Nobody had a cheat sheet on this system. Everybody has the same fair chance. We’re becoming. That’s our motto for the year: “We’re becoming.” We’re becoming sisters. We’re becoming screeners. We’re becoming scorers. We’re becoming elite. We are becoming, and it is a process. I always tell them to have big goals but to focus small. For us right now, it’s not about the goal. It’s about the process and the details, so we are really working on being consistent in how we show up every single day and how we’re performing.
   
• All of the players stick out on different days. I don’t know if there is anyone that I can say has been the most consistent, but there are some that are working towards that. That is the ebbs and flows of a young team. One day we’re great. The second day we’re Ok. The third day, it’s not what we’re looking for. How many good days can we string in a row? If we can continue to do that, you’ll look up and have five straight days of good days. Then two weeks of great days. Then a month of great days. It’s about developing that consistency and letting this team know that they can do hard things.
   
• We play really fast. We want to score in eight seconds or less on a make or a miss. We want get up and down the floor, play really fast and then get into some continuity after that. If that’s not there, we’ll go into some secondary packages. Every player has a package. We’re learning where each player scores best on the floor so we can then put packages around each player. If this player has a hot hand, we can keep feeding them. If this player needs a touch, we can go into this package. That’s just putting them into the best position. Defensively, we’re a man-to-man team. We will play some zone, but we will be in man-to-man. We want to get after it. We want to deny the basketball, turn people over and make it hard to score. We want to take possessions away and increase our possessions.
   
• Everybody wants to play fast until they have to be in shape to play fast, and that’s another area where our players have been challenged because you can’t do that and then play defense at a high level if you’re not in really good shape. We are really honest about that with our players. I was very honest about that in our first team meeting about what they were signing up for or just walked into. I told them if they weren’t OK with that, you’re welcome to go to the transfer portal because this is how we’re going to play. We tell them that they have to be in really good shape. It looks different in the summer than it does in the fall than it does right now. For us, if we can get in really good shape playing basketball, that’s what we want to do. A lot of our drills allow you to get up and down the floor as opposed to just running. The summer is very hard, and that’s not just to get them in shape but for the mental conditioning that they need as well.
   
• The biggest thing is the transition. Right now, it’s adjusting to players that aren’t familiar with you, and you’re not familiar with them. In the SEC, nobody cares about any of that, and they’re going to come after you, trying to kick your butt every time you play. You have put the team in the best position possible to win.
   
• The other thing we’re taking a deep dive into is travel. At Georgia, we were so centrally located to everything in the SEC. Every flight was less than an hour unless we were coming to College Station or going to Columbia, MO. What does that look like? I’ve never experienced every plane ride being possibly over an hour. How do we accommodate our team as the season goes on and they’re taking all these trips that are a lot longer than what we’re accustomed to? We’re going to be fluid, and we’re open to what works best. I don’t know if we’ll leave a day earlier, but we might leave earlier. In the past, we would practice the Wednesday before a Thursday game and not leave until 6:30 or 7 p.m. and be there at 7:45 p.m. on a plane. That’s not going to be the case here. We will start with leaving earlier and adjusting practice times so that we’re done practicing earlier to get them in bed, rested and feeling good about the next day. We’ll see what works best.
   
• I’m really excited. I can’t wait to see how we look. I can’t wait to see how they continue to grow and develop. When you look at film from April to film now, we have grown so much, and I’m so proud of the way they have accepted that challenge. Once they accept a challenge, we give them another and another. They have not folded at all. I’m excited to see who we are at the end of the year and how that continues to develop.
   
• Beyond Basketball is a program we started at Georgia, and it’s a place for women. Men can come, but it’s geared toward women. I’ve always a place for women where someone can speak life into them and recharge their batteries and network with like-minded women. We do so much for so many: We’re wives, mothers, daughters, CEOs, stay-at-home moms, professors, community leaders, retired educators. Who is speaking life into us so that we can go back into the community and be these great, fierce superwomen that we are? That’s what Beyond Basketball is. It’s a meeting space every month, the second Wednesday of every month over breakfast from 8-9 a.m. We have people come in, and sometimes it’s inspirational or motivational or education. Right before COVID-19 shut everything down, we had a panel come in and talk about what the coronavirus really was. The world shutdown right after, and it made us look really smart. The topic varies depending on what’s going on in the world and what that group needs. What has been neat about it is that it brings people together who otherwise might not sit down at the same table to have breakfast or a cup of coffee. It allows me to get out of the box that is Texas A&M Athletics to find out what’s going on in Bryan or College Station and be connected to women that are doing great things. Sometimes there is a call-to-action that goes along with that. If someone stands up and says something is happening in our community and they need help, we can support them. It has been neat to see it grow over the years. We had over 125 people there last Wednesday morning, and I’m excited to see what it looks like in November. We’re going to do some great things in the Brazos Valley and BCS. I’m super excited about it.
   
• Our life is crazy. My family is doing great. My husband is the assistant general manager for the Atlanta Dream, and he was gone half the summer too. Our jobs mesh well. When he was going to his, I was going to USA Basketball. Normally, one of us is always with our two children. They are thriving. They got here at the end of May. We had them in a summer program where they made some friends. They’re really excited right now because Halloween is right around the corner, which is their second favorite holiday outside of Christmas. They’re excited to get dressed up and go trick-or-treating. They’re thriving, and they’re excited.