On Sunday, Lady Vols basketball head coach Kim Caldwell met with the media. She discussed the dismissal of Ruby Whitehorn, the season opener against NC State, her team’s exhibition and more.
Tennessee’s opener against the Wolfpack in Greensboro will be played on Tuesday at 4 p.m. ET and airs on ESPN2.
Here’s what Caldwell said in her press conference.
More From RTI: Kim Caldwell Dismisses Lady Vols Basketball Guard Ruby Whitehorn from Team Days Before Opener
On the decision to dismiss Ruby Whitehorn
“We have standards in this program, and it’s a sad situation. It’s a difficult situation. I feel bad for this current team that we have, and time will tell if it’s the right choice for this team. But I have no doubt that it’s the right choice for the team four or five years from now.”
On the response from the team when they got the news on Whitehorn
“We have four practices to get ready to go to NC State, and that’s all we’re focused on.”
On how difficult the decision was
“Yeah, this is just a sad situation.”
On NC State’s Khamil Pierre (Vanderbilt transfer)
“She’s a beast of an athlete. I’m very disappointed we have to play her again. She can score from all three levels. She can run. She’s a big that can play at our pace. And we’ve watched a lot of clips of our failure to guard her last season, and we fouled her at the rim. We couldn’t stop her at the elbow. We couldn’t stop her on the three-point line. We couldn’t stop her in transition. So we’ve watched those clips, and hopefully we can show improvement.”
On what stands out about NC State as a team
“They’re balanced. It’s just interesting because they’re new, we’re new. They lost two really dominant guards last year, but they reloaded. They still have talent, and we lost a lot last year, but we still have talent. It’s interesting, your first game of the year, because you think you know, but you don’t really know. There’s no film. You haven’t seen anything. You’ve seen some box scores, and so it will be a lot of learning on the fly for probably both teams.”
On what she likes and doesn’t like about starting with a top-10 opponent
“I think the only thing that is good about it, it really locks you in right now. Your level of focus, your level of prep. They know that they have to be on their A game. They can’t take anything for granted. They know that if they don’t fix the things we have been talking about, it’s gonna cost them game one.”
On breaking down the film of the exhibition
“Yeah, I think our turnovers were really bad, and that is one thing that concerns me. I don’t think that that has been fixed in practice. So we have two practices left to fix our turnovers. There was quite a bit. I thought fouls was gonna be one, but getting back in transition was one where they didn’t necessarily capitalize, but you know that NC State will. Those two things were probably the most eye-opening. We gave up 14 offensive rebounds. That’s alarming. We did a pretty good job on the glass, but we should have done a good job on the glass because we had the size. But those things right there and plus the fouls, because I think that will come into play, are gonna be really what this game comes down to because it’s both of our first games.”
On who will step up in place of Whitehorn
“Yeah, we didn’t talk a whole lot about Ruby. We talked about who’s gonna step up, who’s gonna do what, and we went around the room, and everyone said something. She’s not a player that one player can step up and replace in the matter of a day. So everyone is gonna have to give us more. We’re gonna have to get more out of our scorers. We’re gonna have to get more out of our role players. We’re gonna have to have more leadership. We’re just gonna have to have more from everyone, and it’s gonna be by committee.”
On if anyone has stood out in the urgency to fill Whitehorn’s shoes
“Yeah, I think Deniya (Prawl) has done a really good job of really stepping up and being more aggressive in practice. That’s been good to see.”
On what was the cause of turnovers in the exhibition
“Yeah, I think carelessness, bad passing, probably fatigue of not knowing when to slow down, when to speed up. We’ve tried to work on that a lot. Again, it’s not necessarily getting fixed on the practice floor. So just playing with a sense of urgency, because if we’re not turning the ball over, we’re usually pretty efficient on the offensive end in practice. So just making sure that we have a sense of urgency to take care of the basketball and make the extra play, not try to do too much, slow down a little bit. And I think that’s a problem that we will have for probably a month, a month and a half, because we have eight new ones and the pace of play. They just try to go 100% all the time when we gotta know when to go fast and when to go slow.”
On miscommunications with turnovers
“Yeah, you have the right play and you’re not taking the extra bounce, or you’re not playing off two feet, or you didn’t call the name, or somebody doesn’t quite necessarily know what you want yet because, again, we’re not trying to get six players to work well together. We’re trying to get 10, 11.”
On getting the team ready for the physicality of NC State
“I think the biggest key to that is we need to be physical without fouling. I don’t think we’re gonna have a problem being physical. I think we’re gonna have a problem being physical legally, and that’s just a discipline piece that we’re gonna have to try to learn and learn quickly.”
On Janiah Barker playing free in the system
“It’s just typical like it would be with a freshman. They have to unlearn, unlearn, unlearn, and then they kind of see it and it clicks. And it hasn’t clicked for all of our new ones yet. I don’t know that it will yet until we get a couple of games under our belt.”
On the coolest part of the process of players unlearning bad habits
“I think for transfers, my favorite part is when you can see them have fun on the basketball floor during game days. They don’t have to play in fear of making a mistake and they can have fun, they can laugh, they can joke. And we practice so hard, our game days are supposed to be fun days and when they see that and they see that they can have that freedom, those are my favorite moments.”
On Jaida Civil’s performance in the exhibition
“I think we needed to do more. She got a little bit frustrated at the end and then started to play really well when she was frustrated, but we need her to do that for four quarters.”
On Mia Pauldo stepping up in Whitehorn’s absence
“Yeah, and I think we need to get more out of her anyway, just more of a leadership role. She has a good basketball IQ. She has the ball in her hands. Point guard is a very difficult position to play for me. And the quicker that she can step up and learn and come in every day like she is a senior and like this is her last year with that mindset, with that sense of urgency, with that level of focus, the better this team will be.”
On wanting more out of Janiah Barker, her response
“I think she’s going really hard in practice. She’s getting tired in practice. She’s working hard. She’s doing a good job of playing through mistakes, next play mentality, and she’s hopefully starting to turn it on at the right time.”
On Jersey Wolfenbarger and Janiah Barker playing well together
“We’re still working on that. That is something we kind of have four days now to really go back and rework, and so our backs are against the wall in that, of just trying to find the right combinations in a short amount of time. Janiah and Jersey do play very well together. It was not something that I would have guessed until I saw it.”
On the point in the season of when she feels like she solidifies combinations
“Late December. So again, it takes time. Another combo that I have high hopes for are Coop and Zee. We really just hope that they can play really well off of each other.”
On the team’s half-court defense
“That’s one thing we didn’t really get to see in the exhibition. I understand they wanted to play fast. It was a fast game. It was something that we really did not get to look at. And then, you know, you go against your practice guys and they’re fast, they’re strong, and so then you just kind of wonder. We’re having conversations today about slowing our practice guys down so we can see. We have moments where we look really good. We have moments where we look like, wow, we can be special in the half-court, and then we have a lot of moments where we look undisciplined and we’ve never heard the word help side in our life. And it’s about doing it when you’re tired. It’s about doing it in the full court. I think if we would just sit in the half-court, I think we’d be all right, but you have to do it with the space and pace that we want to play at.”
On the breakdowns in the transition defense
“Getting back. Just getting back. We want to crash and sometimes we don’t have somebody calling back and getting back. NC State can go, they’re going to launch into transition if we don’t. So we’ve been working on that.”
On Alyssa Latham’s role
“Alyssa’s huge. She’s been huge. She had a really good off-season. I would say she probably had the best off-season of anyone. She stayed here, she worked, and she got better. And she’s rebounding better. She put on muscle mass. She is moving better. She’s shooting better. So she’s one that we had already kind of anticipated that she’s gonna be bigger than she was last year.”
