2025 is perhaps the yr for girls’s basketball collaborations with NASCAR.
The sports activities of stockcar racing and girls’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 mentioned, per the Daytona Seaside Information-Journal. “I’m hyped to be a part of one thing this legendary and convey my vitality to the observe. That is going to be a second to recollect.”
It’s not the primary time that somebody from ladies’s faculty basketball has helped begin a race at one of many sport’s iconic tracks. In 2022, contemporary off successful her second nationwide championship, South Carolina coach Daybreak Staley drove the tempo automotive at Darlington.
A local of Savannah, Georgia, Johnson has established herself as one of many faces of girls’s faculty 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 one in all solely two gamers on the Energy 4 stage 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 workforce that received the nationwide title in 2023. The Tigers, then largely powered by Angel Reese, bested an Iowa workforce led by Caitlin Clark in Dallas, Texas. Clark’s likeness was on the hood of a stockcar final yr, when Josh Berry’s trip — 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 convey 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 mentioned in a information launch. “Their star energy will set the stage for an unforgettable night time at The World Middle of Racing.”
This race is a big one within the NASCAR calendar as it’s the ultimate one earlier than playoffs start. Drivers desirous to get into the 16-car postseason discipline will probably 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.
