Tennessee has teetered on irrelevancy. Can an outsider return the Lady Vols to the summit?

Tennessee has teetered on irrelevancy. Can an outsider return the Lady Vols to the summit?

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KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — In October, before Kim Caldwell had coached a game for Tennessee, she sat on an orange couch in her office and tried to get comfortable.

This was both a physical and philosophical challenge for the first-year Lady Volunteers coach at the time. At five months pregnant with her first child, there were certain realities about what “comfortable” might look like moving forward for her, and she missed the caffeine that she had given up months earlier (especially at this point in the year when team prep could seem never-ending).

But there was a deeper question: How does Caldwell — who had coached just 33 Division I basketball games — get comfortable in a position once held by one of the most important people in women’s basketball? And not just that, but how does she proceed when the program had fallen from its previous heights to a middling territory, which in Lady Vols-speak, is as bad as irrelevance? As someone who had coached against just three power conference opponents, how would she come up with the answers to get this program back to the standard that Pat Summitt set?

Caldwell, 36, grew up when Tennessee and UConn ruled women’s college basketball. Summitt and Geno Auriemma — their intensity and their rivalry — broke through the noise to make those epic matchups part of the mainstream sporting culture.

“It made people talk about women’s sports. It made people talk about women’s basketball,” Caldwell said. “It was such an incredible time.”

At her AAU practices in West Virginia, Caldwell’s teams were split up not by Team A versus Team B but by the Lady Vols versus the Huskies. At a tournament as a high school player, she looked into the stands and saw Summitt and Auriemma sitting next to one another evaluating recruits and later, walking past Summitt in the hallway.

She never thought — even as recently as a year ago — that she would be coaching against Auriemma in that rivalry game, or throwing on an orange pullover and walking into tournaments to recruit just like Summitt. Last summer, as she prepared for one such tournament in Chicago, she had to give herself a pep talk before walking into the gym — “Here we go. You’ve got bright orange on. Hold your head up high. Get in there,” she told herself — as she wondered if any players would react to her the way she once had to Summit.

Along with UConn and Stanford, Tennessee is tied to a singular coach like almost no other program in women’s college basketball — or college sports. So even on the days when she doesn’t drive past the nine-foot statue of Summitt outside Thompson-Boling Arena on her way to Tennessee staff offices, she still walks by a glass display of the eight national championship trophies that Summitt won. “The Summitt” is painted in script on the floor where Caldwell now coaches her home games. And then there’s the Tennessee orange. A color that Summitt made iconic.

In her book, Summitt wrote, “I remember every player — every single one — who wore the Tennessee orange, a shade that our rivals hate, a bold, aggravating color. … But to us, the color is a flag of pride, because it identifies us as Lady Vols and therefore as women of an unmistakable type. Fighters.”

Since Summitt retired in 2012, Tennessee has been fighting. First, to remain at the top, where Summitt had led the program. And then, to retain relevance. Both endeavors were mostly failures, though the program retained some prestige simply because of its history.

Now Caldwell, who had one season of coaching Division I basketball under her belt when she took the job in April, holds the reins to one of the sport’s most important programs.

“There’s an enormous weight that comes with it, and I knew that going into it. You talk about the history, what Pat Summitt did for sports in general, what she did for the state of Tennessee, what she did for basketball,” Caldwell said. “Where basketball is now. … I don’t know that we would be here without her.”

But over the last few seasons, as women’s basketball has grown more and more popular, Tennessee has been strangely missing from the fold. As the game moves forward, Tennessee hopes that its most recent (unexpected) hire means the Lady Vols don’t miss the next chapter, too.

The surprise around the women’s basketball world was palpable last April when Tennessee fired Kellie Harper. Many assumed she would get at least another season to try and turn around the program.

But any surprise around Harper’s firing paled when compared to the reaction when Tennessee announced its new head coach less than a week later: a swift “who?”

Caldwell had just finished her first season at Marshall. Though she had led the mid-major to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1997 (and just the second time in program history), it lost to four-seed Virginia Tech by 43. Before Marshall, Caldwell had spent seven seasons as the head coach at her alma mater, Division II Glenville State University in West Virginia.

The minimal Division I and power conference experience was obvious, but it was just as glaring that she had no ties to Summitt or even the state of Tennessee. The program stayed within the Summitt tree after she retired, hiring Tennessee native Holly Warlick, a longtime assistant and former player under Summitt, and then, in 2019, turned to Harper, a Tennessee native, Summitt protégé and beloved alum. Neither returned the program to its elite perch, failing to reach the Final Four for more than a decade.

Recruits had never witnessed Tennessee achieve the way the program historically had, though their parents remembered. Getting this hire right was important; every passing day seemingly moved the program further from contention.

Given that Harper was fired with four years left on her contract and she had received an extension from Tennessee athletic director Danny White just a year earlier, most in the industry assumed such a drastic move indicated that White planned to swing for the fences. Harper earned $1.1 million a year — making her the 12th highest-paid coach in women’s college hoops — so if the Lady Vols upped that salary even a bit, they could likely lure a high-profile coach to Knoxville. Tennessee alum and Duke coach Kara Lawson and Las Vegas Aces coach Becky Hammon, who had just won two WNBA titles, were considered people White should pursue. USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb was among the prominent names on media coaching lists. A report connected Tennessee’s search firm to Indiana coach Teri Moren.

The names being floated were esteemed within women’s basketball. Lawson, the only UT alum currently coaching at a high level, was the only Summitt connection in the group.

From Knoxville, White felt a pull away from his predecessors, who had hired from the Summitt tree.

“We had already gone through those chapters twice,” he said. “If there was any pressure at all, it was probably more so to go outside (the tree) and try something different. I don’t know if that was real or something I invented myself, but I certainly didn’t feel pressure to stay inside of coach Summitt’s tree.”

In administrative circles, White’s choice was unexpected, but his methods weren’t surprising.

As the Buffalo AD, he hired men’s basketball coach Nate Oats, who had only two years of college experience as an assistant and had only been a head coach of a high school boy’s basketball team. (Alabama hired Oats five seasons later.) White also hired Lance Leipold as Buffalo’s football coach despite Leipold’s previous seven seasons off everyone’s radar at a Division III school. (Kansas hired him five years later.) At UCF in 2018, White hired Josh Heupel. Many assumed Heupel’s career had dead-ended three years earlier and were surprised he was landing a big job. After three bowl game appearances with UCF, White brought Heupel to Tennessee, which is in the College Football Playoff this season as the No. 7 seed.

“He’s kind of got a Midas touch,” Leipold told The Athletic in 2022.

Hiring for the Tennessee women’s job is its own beast. His conversations with Caldwell reminded him of talking to Heupel. He liked that her system was different and exciting, utilizing a full-court pressing defense that forced turnovers, an offense that took early 3s and hockey-style substitutions that kept players’ legs fresh throughout the games. Her sample size at Marshall was small, but the program had gone from .500 in conference play to winning the league title in her first year.

“I think more frequently in different sports, at the highest level, people are seeing,” White said, “that coaching is coaching.”

The decision made one thing clear: Hiring Caldwell could make White look prescient — and more importantly, the move could return Tennessee to the top of women’s basketball — if it works out. If it doesn’t, it likely will be considered an obvious and avoidable misstep in caretaking the program.

For the first time in a long time, more eyes and scrutiny are on Tennessee. Not because of high expectations, but because everyone wants to know: Is Caldwell the answer to the post-Summitt conundrum?


Kim Caldwell is the first coach hired since Pat Summitt’s retirement to not be from her coaching tree. (Bryan Lynn / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

When Caldwell’s agent, Brian Stanchak, called her on April 1 to tell her Tennessee’s search firm was gauging her interest, Caldwell wondered if it was an April Fool’s Day joke.

“Honestly. I was thinking, ‘Anyone but me. There’s got to be people that have more experience under their belt or an assistant,’” Caldwell said. “I mean, it’s been one year (in Division I).”

Caldwell took a call with Tennessee mostly for the experience of interviewing for a prominent position. She was genuinely happy at Marshall. She and her husband, Justin, had just bought their dream house — a four-bedroom custom home on a spacious lot with an apartment above the garage for her mom.

Other mid-major and power conference jobs had come up during her head coaching career, and her response was always the same: “I love winning and I love my players. I don’t love everything else that comes with coaching, right?” she said. “The lower level you are, the more basketball you usually get to do. That’s as honest, as transparent as I can be about it.”

But the Tennessee job was different.

With a tornado warning in West Virginia hitting right before her scheduled interview slot, she huddled in a closet, rather than postponing because of the inclement weather. She sweated through the interview, not because she was nervous but because the closet was so stuffy. When it ended, she thanked Tennessee for the conversation and assumed that would be the end of it.

But when White wanted her to visit Knoxville, it began to sink in that she actually had a shot.

“Do I stay here because I love it and I’m happy, or do I take the best job that I’m ever going to get offered right now?” Caldwell said. “Because I can work for 80 more years, and I will never get offered a job of this magnitude again.”

Caldwell was surprised at how comfortable she felt in Knoxville, and leaned toward a yes if an offer came.

But there were still detractors. Her mom asked why she would leave a state where she was beloved to coach somewhere she wouldn’t be. ”They’re gonna be like: Who is this? Why is she now our coach?” Caldwell said her mom cautioned.

She told her mom the same thing she had told her players: Don’t leave any regrets on the floor.

So when White called, she accepted. But she also knew the pressures that would come at Tennessee. An antsy fan base, a motivated athletic department, the women’s basketball world wondering how she could solve a puzzle that had proven impossible for other Division II and mid-major coaches.

“I think you just have to bet on yourself and say, ‘Hey, you’re gonna be uncomfortable for a while, but I was just uncomfortable for six months. Yes, I can be uncomfortable again,’” Caldwell said. “You bet on your own success.”

Every season, Caldwell keeps a notebook on her team, what’s going right and wrong, and, most importantly, how she’s feeling. Even during a season when the pressure is so different and the stage is so much bigger, she finds consistent trends in what she writes and feels from year to year.

“I’m miserable,” she said with a laugh in mid-December. “So I’m right on track.”

This is how it goes for Caldwell’s system: In November and most of December, she’s miserable. She never wants to talk basketball at Thanksgiving. By Christmas? She might be ready to talk hoops as things usually start coming together.

With the Lady Vols sitting at 8-0, a few of the early questions have been answered. Tennessee picked up significant wins over Florida State and Iowa earlier this month, but Caldwell knows SEC play will be different.

Home attendance is the highest in Knoxville since the 2015-16 season, and recruiting took off immediately with Caldwell. She’s already picked up two top-25 players in the 2025 class, matching a pace close to Summitt’s in her final five years. By comparison, Warlick signed 10 in seven seasons, and Harper signed just one in her five classes from 2020-24.

“I was pretty shocked at first. And then I kind of told myself, ‘Why not?’ It’s not like the program was a national powerhouse,” said ESPN analyst Andraya Carter, a member of Summitt’s final recruiting class at Tennessee. “I had a lot of reservations, but I started seeing some of the (recruits) she was getting. I just was like, ‘Let’s go.’ The system that she’s running is literally one where you can’t hesitate, so for me, as an alum, not an analyst, I’m not going to hesitate either. … Let’s see what she’s got.”

Caldwell’s Lady Vols lead the nation with 98 points per game and turn over opponents a nationally best 30 times a game. Last season, Marshall finished in the top five nationally in both categories — so that part feels pretty familiar.

But Caldwell’s still getting used to some differences. At Marshall, she had three assistants, one graduate assistant and two managers. At Tennessee, she has a staff of 13 and nine managers. She never had a video coordinator before coming to Knoxville; now practice and game footage are ready and clipped for her nearly by the time practice is over. She said she learned more during her first three weeks in Knoxville than an entire season at Marshall.

With SEC play around the corner, the toughest tests are still ahead of the Lady Vols, but with each win, the argument grows that White made the right move and Caldwell could be the unexpected answer at Tennessee. Will that be enough to bring the program back to its previous heights? Caldwell’s confident enough to bet on herself and her team.

“You don’t turn it down,” Caldwell said. “And then you spend every day trying to make sure that they realize they didn’t make a mistake.”

(Illustration: Meech Robinson / The Athletic; Photos: Bryan Lynn / Icon Sportswire, Damian Strohmeyer / Sports Illustrated via Getty Images, Donald Page / Getty Images)



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