Kim Caldwell Reveals Key Regret in Year Two Coaching Lady Vols Basketball

Lady Vols basketball’s second season under the direction of Kim Caldwell has come to a close. Tennessee finished the year with a loss in the Round of 64 in the NCAA Tournament, 16-14 overall, with eight straight losses and losing 11 of its last 13 games.

After the 76-61 defeat in March Madness to NC State on Friday night, Caldwell reflected on the year. What she pointed out was a regret she had in how she handled the season.

In a system like Caldwell’s, where she looks to press the entire game and cause havoc in order to lead to transition points, you need to be all in. However, she gave the team an out at times, which she dubbed a ‘plan B.’

“You can’t play this style of play and put in a plan B and we put in a plan B,” Caldwell said. “I think when you do that, you lose your identity. You lose your buy-in, you lose your staff a little bit. There’s falter from the top. That’s from me and 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 deserved better than that from me and you learn from that going forward.”

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What exactly was the plan B, though? It’s when she let her team stop pressing and returned to a typical substitution pattern.

While the game plan was always to execute the system going into matchups, she’d sometimes let her team back off of it if it wasn’t working. When the team knew they had another option other than being aggressive and showing effort, it would move to the plan B, which got even uglier.

That’s when the third-quarter woes showed up, and Tennessee would go from hanging around or in range to staring at historic deficits.

“The plan B was when we stopped pressing,” Caldwell said. “We stopped running, jumping, we keep players on the floor for a long time. We walk the ball before we run sets and then we do that in games sometimes after the first two minutes, sometimes we do it in the third quarter. That’s why our third quarters look the way — we had it, right? We had another option. They knew we had another option. They knew if they didn’t get a couple stops here and there that we would go to that. They could be on the floor longer and that’s just not the way it works.

“There was never any clear leadership on my part of, hey, this is exactly what we’re going to do, this is why we’re going to do it. We never got consistent rotations. That’s the first time in my career that we’ve never had players that consistently we know who is going to go in with which group. We just never got there.”

Now, Caldwell is turning the page to year three. She didn’t want to get into too many details, but said she has a long list of things she’s looking to change. Her system doesn’t seem like it’ll be one of them.