Ganiyat Adeduntan is ‘honored and humbled’ to be the head coach at George Washington

As she went through the multiround hiring process, she started thinking about what leading GW could look like. Even more than a month after she was hired, Adeduntan was still pinching herself about the opportunity she is “honored and humbled” to have. 

“I know it requires a lot, so that’s on my mind every single day, but I’m committed,” Adeduntan told The Next on April 23.

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Adeduntan was an assistant coach at GW from 2017-21 — serving as the top assistant for three seasons, including on the 2018 Atlantic 10 Tournament championship team — and returns to the nation’s capital after four years in charge at Colgate. 

She had a 65-61 record with the Raiders after the program won 129 games in the 16 seasons before her arrival. She left Colgate as the second-winningest coach in program history.

In 2024-25, Adeduntan led Colgate to 23 total wins and 13 in the Patriot League, both the best in program history. She also led the team to back-to-back WNIT appearances in 2024 and 2025.

The history, winning tradition, strong academics, and “being able to recruit student-athletes and offer them an opportunity to have a degree that could change the trajectory of their life” appealed to Adeduntan when she came to GW in 2017 and again when she was interviewing to be the head coach eight years later. 

Building for the 2025-26 season

The winning tradition at GW excites, rather than scares, Adeduntan, though she knows she’ll have to provide a product that people want to come see. 

“You’re trying to figure out how to get there,” she said. “… Ultimately, when I think back on it and have conversations with the people that coached in those winning years, [you] have to have players. You have to be able to have talent that can help you play … at a very, very high level. …

“So that’s what we’re trying [to] do: build a roster that is talented, and build a roster that really competes; plays really, really hard; [and] is tough. Because those are the things that you have to have on a championship-level type team. It can’t just be about the talent. You have to be able to do all those intangibles at a high level.”

This season and in the future, Adeduntan wants to press and play fast. Though she sees some pieces on the current roster that can do that, she is also looking to bring in players who can stretch the floor and shoot from the perimeter. 

Recruiting is currently the biggest challenge Adeduntan sees for her and her staff, both because they are “shooting for the moon” and because they are recruiting to a program that has history but hasn’t won in recent years. GW has had just one winning season since it won the A-10 Tournament in 2018.

Just like when she was an assistant coach at the school, she plans to recruit in the Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia (DMV) area. 

“Kids sometimes want to leave home, and I understand that,” Adeduntan said. “But kids also, when they leave home, miss home. So we will recruit them. And if it works out the first go-round, great. If it doesn’t, hopefully we can get them on the back end. So we’re going to know all the great players in this area. And we’re going to try our best to keep them home, and if they want to come back, we’ll be very excited to get them back as well.”

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In her first year, Adeduntan wants to build the team’s identity and culture around core values of love, integrity, gratitude, hard work and trust. “Those are things that we’re not just going to talk about, we’re going to display on a day-to-day, consistent basis. And we’re not going to budge,” she said.

Though she’ll measure success this season by how committed and bought in the team is, Adeduntan also hopes the team will win right away. 

“[My staff and I are] very, very competitive in how we’re recruiting right now,” she said. “We’re very competitive on the court. … We really value the attention to details. All the things that I think winning requires, we’re going to do consistently. We’re not going to waver from it. So we want to win in Year 2, Year 3. And we want to be sitting at the top of the league. … And we hope to be able to take a big jump in this first year.”

On the court, Adeduntan wants to use basketball as a classroom to help her players be great in all facets of their lives. 

“Our three absolutes will be emphasized on a consistent and [unwavering] basis,” she said at her introductory press conference on April 8. “No. 1, communication. Talking is what connects people, and we will be a connected team. No. 2, competitiveness. We will strive to be the very best in everything we do with the goal of winning. No. 3, energy and enthusiasm. Because nothing great was ever accomplished without enthusiasm.”

Adeduntan’s journey to coaching 

While earning her bachelor’s degree in nursing at Florida State, Adeduntan played in 120 games from 2002-06 and averaged 8.7 points and 4.3 rebounds per game. She totaled more than 1,000 points and earned All-ACC and ACC All-Academic honors.

Adeduntan also obtained a master’s degree in nursing, a family nurse practitioner (NP) certificate and a doctorate of nursing practice, going on to work as a nurse and NP. She eventually became a high school head coach and served as the head coach at Division III Wheelock College for two seasons (2012-14) while also working as an NP. 

Adeduntan’s first full-time role in coaching was as an assistant coach at Northeastern from 2014-17. Choosing to coach basketball full-time was a years-long decision for Adeduntan. 

Over those years, Adeduntan talked to friends who were in coaching and her former coaches, but she always told herself the timing wasn’t right for a career change, whether it was her master’s program, her doctoral program, or wanting to gain more nursing experience in case she didn’t like coaching and needed to return to her first career. She is still licensed as a registered nurse (RN) in Massachusetts and maintains her NP certification. 

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As she balanced coaching and nursing, Adeduntan didn’t want to make the wrong decision.  

“I thought I spent too much time in school to switch over,” she told The Next. “And then it just hit me when I was coaching Division III and working as a nurse practitioner: I would sit there and tell my kids to follow their passion … [and] really strive to accomplish their goals. No decision is wrong if it’s thoughtful. 

“So I felt like I had been thoughtful long enough, and I was really enjoying what I was doing when I left my nursing job every day to go coach my team at that DIII school. So I decided at that moment, ‘Hey, this is thoughtful enough. If it doesn’t work out, if I don’t like it, I’ll have something to fall back on.’”

Adeduntan brings up her nursing experience — and how it has impacted her coaching — to recruits. “I value holistic development. So that’s the whole person, from the mental, the physical, the social, the spiritual, the whole wellbeing,” she said. 

“I think all those things are interconnected. So I’m always trying to find ways to pour into our players in all those different areas of the whole person, and that came from my training background in nursing. There’s this extra intensity to this care factor, this intensity to helping people, this intensity to be an advocate for people. I don’t think I would be that person if I wasn’t trained in that way.”

Her experience in nursing also impacts how she approaches things on a day-to-day basis, knowing the game of basketball is not life and death. 

“I think it alleviates this extra burden and pressure that you put on yourself at times to always win,” Adeduntan said. “You can always find success in different ways through the journey. There’s always things that you can stop and just celebrate and enjoy.”

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Adeduntan ended her introductory press conference by referencing the GW Athletics slogan, saying, “Let’s raise high.” 

“It means in anything that you’re doing, there should be this mentality of just being better,” she said. “If you’re ever just stuck in this, ‘I’m doing OK,’ then you really haven’t done much. … Whatever opportunity I get, I just want to be a little bit better, 1% better. So every single day I want to just go above and beyond.”