Lady Vols basketball is off to a 2-0 start to SEC play. Next, Tennessee will head west to Starkville to play Mississippi State on Thursday.
Ahead of the game, Lady Vols head coach Kim Caldwell met with the media to give her thoughts. She was asked about the Bulldogs, turnover woes and more.
Here’s what she said.
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On what stands out about Mississippi State
“They’re a new team. They’re athletic. They’re top 10 in the country in rebounding. We have to go and play in a tough environment with a team that is undefeated at home, plays very well at home. I think that they are a different team at home than they are on the road. So it’s tough to have to go to their place, but it’s tough to go anywhere. And so just got to make sure that we play our game and we box them out and we do what we need to do.”
On if Alyssa Latham will be back for MSU
“When we were getting crushed on the boards, I looked at her and were like, ‘Just go in.’ Like, ‘You got one on, go in.’ But yeah, she practiced yesterday. She looks great. It’s been good to have her back.”
On how much more prepared her team is for SEC play after a tough out-of-conference schedule
“I think we’re better off with the schedule that we have played. Again, I don’t love where we’re at, but I think we’re significantly better off if we would have played every game than if every game would’ve been a cupcake game.”
On where the team chemistry is at
“You know, it’s interesting. People ask all the time if they like each other, do they like each other? Our team loves each other. I mean, they have fun all the time. They enjoy being around each other. But then when we get on the floor, there is a disconnect, and we need more communication, I think. We need all five players, on the offensive end, the defensive end. It’s just really apparent on the offensive end, to communicate, to tell people when you’re open. Our spacing is bad at times. It’s creating a lot of our turnovers. Over-bouncing, we gave them a dribble limit. Nobody was allowed to dribble the ball more than three times in practice because our turnovers last game were coming from over-dribbling.
“We’re taking too many bounces. So just continuing to work on it, and that’s all we can do. And they have to be willing to take the adjustment and learn and not continue to make the same mistake, because when we cut the film up, we had four or five turnovers that I can click right to where they were identical. You would have thought it was the same possession. Just having to learn from them too, and, and being coachable.”
On shot selection being better
“Yeah, it was good. I thought we had a really good half of playing inside out, of getting to the rim, of going in transition, and then again, our third quarter was abysmal. We did not do what we needed to do, and I don’t know if we were settling for bad shots or they just weren’t going in. We talk, they talk. They bring it up before me about putting four quarters together, putting four quarters together, and I don’t know that we have done that yet.”
On what she’s seen from Talaysia Cooper the last two games
“Yeah, she still has more in her – and I’m going to go ahead and challenge her publicly. She still has more in her. She can get to the rim more. She did a better job vs. Florida, but she can get to the rim whenever she wants on one or two people, and she needs to start doing that because we don’t have time to waste.”
On how she is addressing turnovers in practice
“Yesterday was really fun. Anytime we turned the ball over, we took that ball, and we launched it as far as we possibly could. And then they had to go get a new ball off the rack. And once the balls off the rack were empty, we started with three balls on the rack, then we went and ran. And once they ran, they got the balls back on the rack, and we did that a lot. We did a lot of running.”
On how the team responded to that
“I think that they are still not valuing the basketball the way they need to. They don’t want to run, so towards the end, they would figure it out a little bit. A missed shot is not a turnover, but that doesn’t really help. And so I think that it was just very eye-opening to them. We had done that before. We’ve done that all year, give them a turnover count, and once they reach that goal, they run. But really to do it with a visual aid and to throw the basketballs. And Nya loved throwing the basketball. She was really good at it, but that’s again, not the point.
“The point is that, hey, we don’t have to throw the ball. We don’t have to get on the baseline. Let’s be proud of completing the drill. And that’s going to be something that remains in practice until we value it.”
On Mya Pauldo not turning it over
“I’m so proud of her. I’m so happy for her, and she did a great job. We talked about her role to take open shots, to create shots for other people, to guard, and I think she did it perfectly. And we also talked about her learning her bounds. She did that as well. And then it just speaks so much to her character that she came up afterwards and said, ‘Thanks, Coach.’ Not, ‘I told you so,’ or, ‘I could have done this, I could have done that.’ Just a very, ‘Thank you, thank you for the opportunity,’ and I thought that spoke volumes of her character.”
On why Alyssa Latham has been a good rebounder
“Yeah, I mean, she just wants to do it. She’s incredibly athletic. She’s one of, if not our best, out-of-area rebounder. So she will go from the opposite side of the rim and go snatch it down, and I think people feed off of that. I think people see her do it, then they want to do it. I think she was the spark against Florida of going to get those rebounds and tracking them down on both ends of the floor. And she’s capable of doing that again. She cuts, she provides some things in our offense that we need from her, and she’s continuing to grow. But she’s a force on both ends on the glass.”
On if she has a big-picture discussion on the back-loaded SEC schedule with the team
“Absolutely not, no. Absolutely not. We are going one game at a time. It doesn’t matter what order you play people, when you play them, you have to show up. And if you start talking to players like that, then they’re going to think that they don’t have to show up, and that’s not the case. I think most of them know that there are upsets that happen every single night and things, the parity is getting better in the league, and I think you have to show up and perform and take it one game at a time and then continue to get better.
On what Janiah Barker has done well in SEC play
“I challenged her about her turnovers, and I challenged her about her rebounding, and she was really taking the rebounding to heart. We’re still working on the turnovers. Again, going to get rebounds when you’re her, Zee, Alyssa, Jersey, anyone, Coop, anyone. It’s something that you can control. So don’t worry so much about your scoring. Go get us 10 rebounds and we have multiple people that can go get you eight to 10, and that’s a prime point in what we want to do.”
On how the freshmen have responded to SEC play
“I think so. And again, I think just you got to stack days together, and you got to stack games together. And our non-conference schedule helped with that. We played in some big arenas, and our first game was a big stage. We played in New York. It was a big stage. And so when you go on the road in these tough environments and you let them go on a run and the crowd gets into it, it’s not something they haven’t seen before.”
