How Talayah Walker learned to let it fly at Georgia Tech

Head coach Karen Blair pulled up a spreadsheet on Talayah Walker’s transfer portal visit to Georgia Tech. It showed who she’d recruited and how many spots she still had to fill. Walker had a question. Summer was getting closer. When did Blair think she’d have a roster? “You know what? I don’t know,” the first-year head coach told her, Walker recalled. Blair laughed. So did Walker. And somehow, that made Walker feel better about coming to Georgia Tech. Being from Maryland, she’d known Blair for years. Now she knew what it would be like to ask her a question she didn’t have a good answer for yet. “I just appreciated her honesty,” Walker told On3. “That’s something that I’ve mainly been looking for in a coach.” They’d have plenty to figure out together. For starters, Blair was about to ask a player who thought of herself primarily as a defender to take 20 shots a game. Walker had a question about that too. “Where are you expecting these shots to come from?” Finding 20 shots When Walker transferred from Penn State after starting two games as a freshman, Blair talked about how much she loved her rebounding. Walker had always been able to score, Blair said, but what she remembered from watching her was how willing she was to change the way she played depending on who was around her. If a team needed her to defend, she defended. If they needed her to rebound, she rebounded. Georgia Tech needed her to shoot. “She had all the intangibles of being the superstar because she was willing to put in the work,” Blair told On3. “She wanted to get better. So as a staff, our job was like, alright, how do we create that self-belief and that confidence that she needs?” There were games early in the process when Walker would get to 15 or 17 attempts and feel like she was “just jacking shots.” She’d been taught to move the ball, make the defense work and find the best look. So she watched more film. She spent extra time in the gym working on different ways to score and talked through what she was seeing with her coaches. Eventually, she started to recognize some of the looks they wanted her to take earlier in a possession, especially in transition. Blair remembers walking with Walker to meet the media after Georgia Tech upset Notre Dame 95-90 in overtime last season. Walker had just scored 33 points to go with 10 rebounds and six assists. She looked to her coach with a question. “Did I shoot it 20 times yet?” By the end of the season, Walker had scored 576 points and earned first-team All-ACC honors. As much as her game had changed, she was still getting used to seeing herself that way. “I’ve never seen me play like this,” Walker said. The planner By the time the group of newcomers arrived ahead of Walker’s junior season, she had a plan for them. There would be dinners. There would be activities. One day, she brought the new players into Blair’s office while the coaches were in a meeting. She’d decided they should all go say hello. When Georgia Tech had recruits in town, Walker helped plan the weekend. They went to the mall and an adventure park in Atlanta. They also had a murder mystery dinner at Blair’s house. Walker played Beyonce. Blair played Betty White and drew the role of the murderer. Walker says both recruits committed. “I love planning,” Walker said. “I like parties, making things look nice, just gatherings. I just love it.” Getting everybody together came easily to her. Figuring out how to lead them on the court took more work. As an underclassman, Walker said, she could follow the older players and “ride their wave.” This year, she’s one of the people responsible for creating it. Sometimes that means getting on a teammate in practice. Sometimes it means realizing a younger player needs somebody to explain something Walker already knows. “Leadership doesn’t look one way,” Walker said. “It can look many different ways.” Exactly 20 Walker didn’t realize she had 28 points at halftime against Hofstra in the opening game of the 2026-27 women’s college basketball season. She knew she’d found a rhythm early and she knew she was taking some of the shots her coaches had been asking her to take. Blair recognized them too. There were open threes in transition and midrange pull-ups Walker might have passed up a year earlier. She could still get to the rim and draw fouls. She was getting better at recognizing when she already had the shot she wanted. Looking back, Walker thinks she would’ve passed up a good number of those attempts earlier in her career. On Monday, she took 20 shots and made 15. She finished with 40 points in an 80-65 win, setting an ACC record for points in a season opener. Her parents were the first people she talked to after the game. “Oh, who do you think you are?” they teased her, as Walker remembers it. “Hey, man, I’m just playing,” she told them. Walker wants to take Georgia Tech to the NCAA Tournament. If getting there means she has to do something she’s never done before, well, she’s getting pretty good at that.