2025 is perhaps the 12 months for girls’s basketball collaborations with NASCAR.
The sports activities of stockcar racing and ladies’s basketball are crossing paths once more this weekend in Daytona on the Coke Zero Sugar 400, the place LSU famous person guard Flau’Jae Johnson will wave the inexperienced flag because the race’s honorary starter.
“Attending to wave the inexperienced flag on the Coke Zero Sugar 400 is such an honor,” Johnson stated, per the Daytona Seashore Information-Journal. “I’m hyped to be a part of one thing this legendary and convey my vitality to the monitor. That is going to be a second to recollect.”
It’s not the primary time that somebody from girls’s school basketball has helped begin a race at one of many sport’s iconic tracks. In 2022, recent off profitable her second nationwide championship, South Carolina coach Daybreak Staley drove the tempo automobile at Darlington.
A local of Savannah, Georgia, Johnson has established herself as one of many faces of ladies’s school basketball heading into her senior season at LSU and can seemingly be a lottery choose within the 2026 WNBA Draft. The 5-foot-10 All-American guard was certainly one of solely two gamers on the Energy 4 degree final season to common at the very least 18.5 factors, 5.5 rebounds. 2.5 assists and 1.5 steals per recreation. The opposite was USC star JuJu Watkins.
Johnson is, after all, additionally a rapper who’s signed with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation. This chance for her at Daytona is her newest alternative to be within the limelight. She additionally has NIL offers with JBL, Taco Bell, Powerade and Puma.
A 3-time All-SEC choice, Johnson was a starter on the LSU staff that received the nationwide title in 2023. The Tigers, then largely powered by Angel Reese, bested an Iowa staff led by Caitlin Clark in Dallas, Texas. Clark’s likeness was on the hood of a stockcar final 12 months, when Josh Berry’s experience — sponsored by Panini — ran the Brickyard.
Whereas Johnson will wave the inexperienced flag, WWE star Rey Mysterio will function grand marshal and provides the “begin your engines” name.
“Rey is certain to carry his high-flying vitality giving the command to begin engines whereas Flau’jae waves the inexperienced flag with ardour beneath the lights,” Speedway President Frank Kelleher stated in a information launch. “Their star energy will set the stage for an unforgettable evening at The World Heart of Racing.”
This race is a major one within the NASCAR calendar as it’s the remaining one earlier than playoffs start. Drivers wanting to get into the 16-car postseason subject shall be preventing for place on the second race of the season on the iconic speedway. William Byron — driver of the No. 24 Chevy and winner of the common season championship — received the Daytona 500 in February.
