Lady Vols basketball is back in action on Thursday evening for a matchup with Missouri. Ahead of the game, slated for 6:30 p.m. ET on SECN+, Tennessee head coach Kim Caldwell met with the media.
She was asked about Kellie Harper’s return, the loss to South Carolina, where her team is at and more.
Here’s what Caldwell said.
More From RTI: Kellie Harper Talks Return to Tennessee with Missouri After Tenure as Lady Vols Coach, Player
On the team’s response to South Carolina
“We’ve had one practice, so it’s a small body of work there to answer your question, but I’m hopeful we’ll respond. I think they will respond. I have faith in them that they’ll do that, and they were good yesterday. We have to continue to put good days together and be consistent.”
On how much the preperation for next game is Missouri vs. South Carollina focused
“I think it’s both. I think we have problems that we need to fix, more so turning the ball over, getting back in transition. We’ve given up a lot of transition points in the losses that we’ve had, and then we have to move on. They’re very different scouts.”
On the tape from South Carolina
“We addressed it. Of course, you come in, and you have this much conversation publicly, you address it as a team, and I think that they handled it very well. I think that they were mad, and they should have been mad, and I think, again, I think we will get a response out of them. I think it’ll stop happening. I think that they took accountability. I took accountability and just move forward as a team.”
On what growth she wants to see from upperclassmen
“Yeah, I think that they will grow. We talked yesterday, and we talked a little bit before going into South Carolina, but we’re at the point of the season where if you’re a senior, the clock is on. You have three weeks left, guaranteed, and I know you have tournament play, but three weeks guaranteed left, and it’s the part of the season where you start to talk to your older ones about don’t have any regrets. Get in the gym. If you want to have something to say, say it. If it’s a work ethic thing, make sure you do it because the clock is on, and they don’t know how much life changes after basketball, but they do know that they’re going to miss it.”
On what the team was mad about
“I think that it’s not acceptable in this program to lose the way we lost, and I think everyone knows that, and I think they know that. I know that. Our fan base knows that. It’s not the standard here at Tennessee, and again, you want to get a response out of them. You don’t want it to be okay. It’s not going to be okay. We can’t go after a loss like that and just come back in and treat it like another loss. We can’t just, ‘Okay, let’s watch the film, and let’s move on.’ Like, we need to address some things. We need to fix it. We need to do it with a sense of urgency because we’re still in a really good position to achieve our goals. But we have to just continue to fix some behaviors and change some things.”
On what stands out about Missouri
“They are excellent offensively. They’re incredibly efficient. They shoot the three really well. Best shooting team in the SEC. We have to guard. We have to guard together. We have to make multiple efforts. We can’t take a play off, really be locked in on the defensive end, or they’re going to be a team that can put a 9-0, 12-0 run on you quickly, and it can all be from the three-point line.”
On Kellie Harper’s return, if they’ve met
“We met at SEC (Tournament) last year. This was the first time we met.”
On things she’s changed this week
“I think that, again, we had one day. It’s going to take time, it’s going to take prep, it’s going to take – the most important thing is going to be consistency. Again, that’s a top-down thing of holding them accountable consistently. I think the biggest failure that I had as a coach is we were playing really well, and I sat here, and I was talking about how proud I was of their mindsets, and I felt like we checked a box and moved on. And I know better than that as a coach. They’re young people. You never check a box and move on. And so I told a few of them yesterday, ‘I think I’m a better coach for you guys when I’m just mad all the time, and that’s the version that we’re going to get.'”
On what it means that some players get ‘it’ and some don’t
“That we play an effort-based system, and it doesn’t work if you don’t play hard.”
On the ideal response vs. Missouri
“I think for us, a response would be know your scout, do scout-specific things, adjust to the in-game adjustments in real time. The biggest thing for us is play with some passion, play with some fire, do it as a team, do it consistently, be the hardest playing team on the floor.”
On confidence, playing as underdogs
“Yeah, I think we’re still working on that. Normally, I coach players that really like to be the underdog. We think that we could spin it more of an underdog story if we needed to. But at the end of the day, we’re going to have to play the top six teams in the country, the majority of them on the road. We played a very hard schedule. We played a hard schedule so that we can grow up. We played a hard schedule, so that when we get in the NCAA tournament, we know exactly what it takes. I’m disappointed that the margin is what the margin is, and I think that, again, that’s not the standard that our team – I can’t look at my team, and I will never look at my team and say that’s acceptable, and they know that. They know that they’re not that much worse, and we’re playing great teams on the road. It’s not that we are losing, it’s the manner in which we are doing it.”
On Kellie Harper saying her return isn’t about her
“Yeah, we have to win. We just, we have to win. You gotta win your next game. That’s what everything in the SEC is. For every team, you have to win your next game, you have to win your next game, you have to win your next game. If we want to achieve our goals, you look at how many games we have left. We have a lot of games in a short amount of days. We just have to grind it out game by game.”
On the defensive effort being a focuse
“We are. I think that in our past four games, I think our defense, especially our half-court defense, has taken a step backwards, and so it’s limited our transition offense. It hasn’t been as clean and as nice as it looked. When you go back to our last game that I was really proud of was our Kentucky game, and our offense wasn’t there, but we grinded it out defensively, and we worked hard defensively. We had so many clips publicly, and so many pictures, and so many moments, and so many plays on film where it was passionate, and it was all from the defensive end, and it was hype and energy, and our bench was great because we were getting stops.
“And I think that that is really the best part about this team, is when they are playing like that. They are getting turnovers, and they are chest-bumping because they got a stop on the defensive end. And I think that that fuels us, and I think we’ve gotten away from that in our past four games, and we need to get back to it.”
On balancing not panicking and having urgency
“I think right now, right or wrong, inside I draw from them. I draw from them. You have to get pulse points with your team, and you look at your team, and you say: ‘Do you think you can win?’ And they say, ‘Yeah, we think we can win.’ And, and so you know that that’s where their mindspace is, their headspace is. ‘So yeah, we can win. Coach, we got it. We can win. We got it. We’ll fix it.’ And that builds confidence in a coach of, ‘Okay, you think maybe they’re hitting the panic button, they’re kids, that they think they can win.'”
On if she senses that they have confidence
“They look me in the eye, and they look me in the eye, and they tell me they have that confidence, and I don’t think it’s fake. I don’t think it’s an answer that they – sometimes, too, people give you an answer that they think you wanna hear. I don’t think that that’s what’s happened with any of them.”
On anyone taking the call for leadership personally
“I think all of them took it personally, and so we talked that we do need leadership. This has been leading up to this game, that we have said that, ‘We need more leadership. We need more leadership.’ And I think everyone can lead in their own way. Some people lead by example, some people lead quietly, some people lead by talking to individuals, and some people have the voice, and we need a refresh of that. I think they know we need a refresh of that, and yeah, I think that they took that challenge, and I think that challenge will be faced.”
On Alyssa Latham being a leader
“Yeah, I think she is by nature a quiet person, but she is somebody that people listen to. She’s somebody that does things the right way. She is somebody that doesn’t care about how many points. Like, her scoring the ball or her getting in foul trouble or a play not going her way, a turnover for her is not gonna make or break how she leads and what her character is. And so I think that we need just to continue to develop her, and she needs to try to be a little more vocal, and that’s a little bit outside of her comfort zone. But I think people listen to her because she shows up and does the right thing every day.”
On if taking the loss personally will benefit the team longterm
“That’s the hope. That’s the hope. The hope is that we can come back, and we can point to this moment right now, that it’s not a flattering moment. It’s not a flattering moment for our program. It’s not a flattering moment for me. It’s not a comfortable situation for me to be here in this seat and have drawn attention to a failure and made it more public by my comments. But I hope that it’s a turning point, and we can go, ‘Well, that worked.’ That’s my hope.”
On if she ever looks ahead to next year
“We have to win now because we’re here at Tennessee. We have to represent our brand. I’m never, ever, ever, ever gonna give up on a team. I’m never gonna turn the page. I’m never gonna scrap it. I’m never gonna do that. I wanna keep our freshmen. I want to retain our freshmen. I think our freshmen do things the right way, but never in a million years am I gonna turn the page to next year. I’m not gonna do it when we’re tied for second in the SEC. I’m not gonna do it when we’re top 25 in the country. I’m not gonna do it when we’re not top 25 in the country or we’re dead last in the SEC. It’s not who I am. It’s not what a leader does.”
