Lady Vols basketball had little to no success against South Carolina on the road on Sunday. Tennessee fell 93-50, marking the worst margin of defeat in program history.
After the game, Lady Vols head coach Kim Caldwell met with the media. In her opening statement, Caldwell noted that her team had ‘quit’ in them. When things didn’t go their way, it snowballed into the final score that rewrote the record book.
When it was South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley’s turn to meet with the media, she was asked about those comments from Caldwell. First, she was asked to address if her teams have had those quitting attributes before. Then, she was asked what advice she might give Caldwell.
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“I would say very rarely,” Staley said. “I mean, you can see for us, like, there won’t be quit. There might be some undisciplined play out there. There might be some just we don’t have it and we’re just on a gerbil wheel, working hard, but going nowhere, right? You can see some of that, and that’s correctable. For a young coach like Kim, coaching for the traditional powerhouse of Tennessee, for me, I probably wouldn’t say it publicly. That’s one. Two, you just gotta get your team to buy in. And sometimes it’s tricking them. Because it’s a game. It’s a game that you really have to balance and play with the players. Because they know they played like ish, right? They know they did. Sometimes you need to bring, ‘What good happened?’
“If you could find some good in it, ‘Hey, this is if we did more of this’, some of that might just kind of relax them a little bit, because competitors know when they don’t play well. Competitors know when they need to change their mindsets. And you need the majority of your team thinking the same way. And it has to be positive. If it’s negative, you’re going to get negative results. So I would start from there.”
Next, the Lady Vols will return home after three games away from Knoxville. On Thursday, Feb. 12, Tennessee hosts Kellie Harper’s Missouri squad. This will be Harper’s first return as a coach to Knoxville since she was fired as the Lady Vols’ head coach. She was also a multi-time national champion player under Pat Summitt.
The game against the Tigers is set for 6:30 p.m. ET. It will air on SECN+.
