Kim Caldwell Is Running Out Of Hard Truths To Deliver

Asked what advice she’d give Tennessee head coach Kim Caldwell after the Lady Vols’ 93-50 loss to South Carolina on Sunday, a diplomatic Dawn Staley demurred: “I probably wouldn’t say it publicly.” That makes one! Caldwell, at her postgame press conference, had a lot to say publicly in the wake of the worst loss in program history.

“We just had a lot of quit in us tonight, and that’s been something that’s been consistent with our team,” Caldwell said. “When we’re not comfortable and things don’t go our way, I have a team that’ll just quit on you. And you can’t do that in big games—you can’t do that any time in the SEC, but you certainly can’t do that at a program like this.” 

It was only a year ago that things were looking up for Tennessee and a just-hired Caldwell. Last February, the Lady Vols beat UConn to end an 18-year drought in their rivalry series. The win seemed to validate athletic director Danny White’s decision to hire someone with no prior connection to the program. Since Pat Summitt’s death, Tennessee had only considered and hired former players and assistants of hers. Caldwell, previously the coach at Marshall, was hired for her distinctive system, which focuses on creating as many offensive possessions as possible by forcing turnovers with a press, and shooting early in the clock. To keep the team in shape for this brand of play, Caldwell uses hockey-style line substitutions. 

Not so fast, UConn said. Maybe that win was the kind which gimmicky teams like Tennessee are wont to run into—not a turning point so much as a fluke. On Feb. 1, the Huskies handed the Lady Vols a 30-point loss in a game that was tied at halftime. This winter has been less charmed for Tennessee than the last one. The loss to UConn followed another loss to Mississippi State, which Caldwell said she’d had a bad feeling about from the beginning. The players were late to warmups before the Mississippi State game, she explained at the postgame press conference. “I knew it in shootaround that it was gonna be bad.” But she went on to blame herself for failing to properly prepare her team. “It’s my job to raise them as leaders and have those conversations,” Caldwell said. “And, well, I don’t think that I’ve been doing a very good job at that.”

After Sunday’s game against South Carolina, Caldwell was crawling out from under the bus and offering her team a place there instead. The grace period was over, and now, actually, it was their job to be leaders themselves. “We don’t have the leadership we need, player-wise,” she said. In their defense, Caldwell’s team is young. Though Caldwell has quickly proven an excellent recruiter, her predecessor Kellie Harper put her in a tough spot for now with lackluster recruiting classes in the years before Caldwell took the job. The roster now features five freshmen, including the entertaining point guard Mia Pauldo, a speedy and fearless point guard who seems to end up on the floor a lot. Among the challenges of running a gimmick system is that it takes some time for young players to learn, and Campbell’s is the type that can go spectacularly wrong if it isn’t going right. It can look spectacularly ugly, too: Against South Carolina, the Lady Vols shot 44 threes and made 10.

For the program’s extremely passionate fans, the magnitude of the loss probably mattered less than the circumstances. The limits of a gimmick are often easy for a truly good team to expose; the Gamecocks killed the Tennessee offense with a run-of-the-mill zone. Kooky systems are for the Marshalls of the world. Seeing one’s “blue blood” team die by gimmickball can wound a fanbase’s self-image, and this is a fanbase whose self-image can’t take much more wounding. Caldwell is stuck in a Nebraska football-esque predicament, asked to resurrect a heyday that probably can’t be resurrected. At the hint of dysfunction, some fan is always ready to declare that no one would ever be late to Pat Summitt’s warmups, and if they were, she would personally explode their head with her eyes. Fans like Dan, a season-ticket holder who has been a loyal fan since 1975, are absolutely ready to write in to the Knoxville News Sentinel to declare that he has “quit” being a fan and “will not go to Thompson-Boling Arena or give one cent nor follow this team if the incompetent (UT athletic director) Danny White keeps Caldwell and her assistants.”

Dan is not wrong to be skeptical. For players who play about 90 seconds of basketball at a time, the Lady Vols have looked remarkably sluggish in the second half of these big games. If there is a reason for this pattern, Caldwell did not seem curious to know it: “That’s a question for them about why they can’t stick together,” she said when asked.

Has she lost the locker room? Is she doomed? Maybe. It is also true that this is something like the median SEC women’s basketball press conference. No league is doing it better. Apologies to Caldwell: The quote of the weekend actually belonged to Staley, who honored former Gamecock (and now Super Bowl champ) Nick Emmanwori by wearing a Seahawks jersey to Sunday’s game. Responding to a question about injuries her team has dealt with, she said, “We don’t speak about the injured. We don’t speak about them. We don’t If this happens or If she could play or that player could play. We actually—quite frankly—we consider them dead.”