By Rhiannon Potkey
Any momentum generated by the University of Tennessee women’s basketball team in head coach Kim Caldwell’s debut last season has completely evaporated. The Lady Vols ended one of the most disappointing seasons in the program’s storied history with a first-round exit in the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament.
Tenth-seeded Tennessee (16-14) bookended its season with losses to North Carolina State, falling 76-61 last Friday in Ann Arbor, Michigan, after losing to the Wolfpack in the opener. The Lady Vols finished the season with the first eight-game losing streak in the modern era of the program. For the first time since the NCAA Tournament was created in 1982, Tennessee went winless in the month of March. UT’s 16 wins were the lowest in a single season in program history.
“There have been very few times that I have hit failure, and I’ve never hit failure to this extreme,” Caldwell says. “It’s a tough place to do it, publicly, and I didn’t like who I was at certain times.”
Caldwell arrived on Rocky Top after coaching at Marshall for one season. It was her only head coaching experience at the Division I level following a successful stint at her alma mater, Glenville State, which she led to the 2022 Division II national title.
The Lady Vols finished 24-10 in Caldwell’s first season, reaching the Sweet 16 and ending the season ranked in the Top 25. Trying to build on that success, the UT coaching staff made a splash on the recruiting trail by attracting the No. 2 freshman class in the nation. But the pieces never seemed to fit together in Caldwell’s unorthodox high-tempo offense, which uses hockey-style substitution patterns.
“You can’t play this style of play and put in a plan B, and we put in a plan B,” Caldwell says. “I think when you do that, you lose your identity. You lose your buy in. You lose your staff a little bit and there’s fault from the top, and that’s from me. I did that in the middle of the season. I know better than to do that and it was the worst year of my professional career. Our players deserve better than that from me.”
Many questions, few answers
The UT players were clearly unhappy as the season stretched on, with one quitting the team and others being benched during games or getting into verbal disagreements. Last month, Caldwell said she noticed “a lot of quit in us” after a loss to South Carolina.
Before the NCAA Tournament, UT Athletic Director Danny White gave Caldwell a vote of confidence in a radio interview, saying “I am as confident in her as I was the day I hired her – more confident.”
Caldwell laid the blame at her feet for the unmet expectations.
“I can’t put it on roster construction. I gotta put it on me, right? I’ve always been able to recruit players ... and get them to run through a wall for me and get them to play hard,” Caldwell says. “I wasn’t able to do that, and the one thing I can put my finger on is that I bailed on what we wanted to do first, and then how can I blame anyone else for doing it?”
UT redshirt junior guard Talaysia Cooper scored 24 points in the season-ending loss to NC State, preventing the final score from being even more lopsided. Asked what needs to change in the offseason, Cooper said “effort.”
“My coach Kim says it a lot. This is an effort-based program,” Cooper says. “If you don’t want to work hard, if you don’t want to press, don’t think about coming here because this is what she does and she is not changing it.”
It would not be surprising to see the Lady Vols lose several players through the transfer portal. Whether there is a shake up of the coaching staff remains to be seen. But anyone staying at UT will spend the next few months doing a lot of introspection after a season that was defined more by drama and dysfunction than wins.
“I think personally, the most important thing is making sure that you and the people around you keep your character when your prayer doesn’t really match God’s plan,” Caldwell says. “And I think I didn’t do a great job of that personally (against NC State), and then Xs, Os, there’s a list, but today’s not the day to get into that.”