On Sunday afternoon, Tennessee softball took down Virginia 5-1 to clinch a spot in the super regionals. Now, the Lady Vols will host Georgia for a spot in the Women’s College World Series. It’ll be a three-game set in Knoxville next weekend.
After the win over the Hoos, Tennessee head coach Karen Weekly met with the media to give her thoughts on what transpired. She was asked about the plan to prepare for the supers, surviving regionals and more.
Here’s what she said.
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Opening statement
“We are elated and exhausted. That was a battle out there, but we certainly expected that when we saw who was in this regional. I want to congratulate Northern Kentucky, Indiana and, certainly, Virginia. I thought it was just a really well-played regional, just competitive game after competitive game, just good, clean softball. I have a ton of respect for Joanna and Virginia, and how they run their program. We’ve had them here before, and you just know you’re going to get a really, really good softball team that competes hard, never quits. They’re going to make everything really difficult for you to earn, and they did that today.
“Super proud of these two to my left (Karlyn Pickens and Taelyn Holley). Really proud of our whole team, but just for the grind. Karlyn is such a warrior, such a warrior, and she’s been around the block and been in these kinds of games, and the bigger the game, the more she digs deep and steps up. The bigger the moment in a game, the more she digs deep and steps up, whether it’s her best day of her stuff or not her best day, you just know that she’s going to have that extra gear, and it’s really awesome as a coach, and I know being her teammate to play behind somebody who is going to fight that hard.
“And then I just want to say about Tae, before the weekend, I just told her I’m so impressed and proud of how you’ve matured this year, because she had a tough spell in the middle of the season, and she just kept working every day, kept working, and it’s really hard to do that when you don’t get the immediate results, but she just kept her nose down, kept doing extra, kept trying to figure it out, and what you saw today is really the product of probably the last month of working and just having the faith that eventually I’m going to get those results. And we couldn’t have had them at a better time. And to have a freshman play like she did today, that’s what we saw when we recruited her, that’s what everybody on this team saw in the fall, and I’m just really proud of her maturity.”
On Taelyn Holley’s at-bats
“She’s a pro. I saw that in the fall, and that’s how I described her, is she’s a professional hitter. And sometimes you just have to find your way back to who you are, and that’s the struggle with athletics. Everything doesn’t go the way you want it to, and you can start to doubt and question yourself, and she had the faith and the confidence in herself. But her reset moments today were brilliant, absolutely brilliant. When she, I think it was the first one, drew the walk, there were so many moments in that at-bat where she reset herself. There was another at-bat later where she got strike two called on her, that we all were kind of like, I don’t know, and that’s a time any hitter can then go out of the zone because they think the umpire’s forcing them out of the zone. She was just like, nope, and every at-bat were just inspiring moments of her resetting herself.”
On freshmen Taelyn Holley and Elsa Morrison’s at-bats
“Just the maturity. And it’s crazy, like if you saw Elsa in the fall again, super talented, but they both had their moments where you got to adjust to softball at this level, and sometimes the hardest thing to adjust to is every practice matters. Like they’re not used to practicing this much, or every rep in practice needing to be mentally focused, but they’re both individuals who embrace that and from day one said we want to be pushed. Like we want to be the absolute best we can be and you can’t be too hard on us, keep pushing us. And it’s been really cool to watch both of them just look like upperclassmen in the postseason.”
On the offense progressing over the weekend
“We just kept the faith, and we had so much evidence from the season of how good we were offensively, but then we got a lot of evidence this past week. Like we had a really, really good week, a week plus, of practice after we got home from the SEC Tournament. And again, all the credit goes to the coaches and the game plans and the preparation, but these players, too, like we did not have a bad practice, and sometimes at the end of the season, when you’re practicing more because you’re not playing longer in the SEC Tournament, your players can drag through it a little bit. And they didn’t. They came every day ready to work, ready to get better, and we got better. Like this week, we had our best practices of the entire year, and the growth we made in one week was pretty remarkable. And I think they just had so much faith in themselves. again, because of what they’d done through the year, but then, because of what they saw in themselves this past week.”
On having continued success year after year, returning to a fourth-straight super regional
“It’s all about the players. I mean, you go recruit great players, and you just develop them and they buy in. I mean, it’s them. It’s them. You don’t win if you don’t have great players, and we’ve had a long history of great players. And I know that it matters to these guys to play at a high level, and I’m not just talking about performance, but how they represent themselves on the field, because they want to make the alumni group proud of them, and they do, and it’s really cool to see that relationship. So, yeah, that’s what allows us to do this. You talk about taking it for granted. I think we were just so darn tired at the end of the game that it can look like, oh, we’re just relieved to win. No, it was exhausting, but there is a standard in this program, and they all know it. And so it’s that fine line, like we need to celebrate this, because it’s not easy, but they also know this is where we expected to be, and we expect to be moving on to a supers.”
On the emotions of this weekend
“Well, Karlyn hasn’t experienced losing in regionals, and she’s probably a reason why we haven’t experienced losing in regionals in the last four years, but I did in ’21 and ’22 and it’s a gut punch. It’s really, really, really hard. So yeah, I feel for those, I guess, 48 teams that are not going to be playing after this weekend. I mean, we talked when the selection show came around about, hey, there’s only 64 teams that get to keep playing, so that’s like 240 or so that are already packing their bags. And I think it’s good for us to always be reminded to be grateful for that, and yes, we put in the work, but it takes a lot of things to win right now. It takes talent, it takes people like Tae, who just kind of keep working all year. It takes a little luck going your way. It takes not having a crazy injury, you saw that happen this weekend, too. So, there’s a lot of things that go into it, and we’re never going to stop being grateful for it.”
On the focus preparing for supers vs. Georgia
“Right now, rest. Like tomorrow, we need this big rest and recovery day. We won’t know till later tonight if we’re playing Thursday or Friday. We know who we’re playing, Georgia. We didn’t play them this year, but obviously, being in the SEC, we know what they’ve done and what kind of team they are. One of the best offenses in the SEC this year and in the country. If you’re the best in the SEC, you’re the best in the country. We also have the best pitching staff. They have a really well-rounded pitching staff. I think probably a little bit deeper than they’ve had in the last couple years. We have a dynamic offense that is hitting its stride when we need to be hitting our stride. So it’s supers. I mean, there’s not a whole lot that separates seven and 10, so it’s going to be a battle.”
