The worst, Kim Caldwell hopes, is gone. Now with a new team, she’d like to look back at the previous one as an outlier, both for Tennessee’s prestigious women’s basketball program and her own coaching career.
But boy, it was bad.
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So bad that one couldn’t help but admire Caldwell’s attendance and attitude. She was there. She took her medicine with a smile, too, answering all the questions, humbly and candidly. She could have begged out of this year’s Big Orange Caravan in Nashville, held April 29 at Marathon Music Works. She’d have had an excuse. She’s been busy, after all.
She just had to assemble that completely new team. Which followed the exodus of all of her players. Which followed an ugly finish for last season’s Lady Vols, who appeared at times to quit on Caldwell and Tennessee’s evaporating season, failing to remain competitive.
On Feb. 12, Tennessee beat Missouri to earn its 16th victory of the season. From there, the Lady Vols didn’t win again. Their season-ending, eight-game losing streak was punctuated by a 10-point loss to Vanderbilt in the home finale, followed by a 12-point loss to Alabama in the SEC Tournament and then a 15-point loss to NC State in the NCAA Tournament.
It was alarming, creating sudden, serious doubts about Caldwell’s stewardship of the Lady Vols after only two seasons.
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“I have always been able to recruit players and stack talent and get them to run through a wall for me and get them to play hard,” Caldwell told reporters at the NCAA Tournament site, “and I wasn’t able to do that.”
The 16 victories were the program’s lowest total since the mid-1970s, when the great Pat Summitt’s first two Tennessee teams went 16-8 and 16-11 in the sport’s pre-NCAA Tournament days.
Soon after, of course, Summitt built one of the all-time powerhouses in college hoops, winning eight national championships and intensifying expectations. No other sport on Tennessee’s campus, including football, carries a higher standard for coaching success.
Holly Warlick got seven seasons. Her first three teams logged an average of 29 wins and were No. 2 NCAA seeds or better. Her final team was her worst, going 19-13 team in 2018-19.
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Kellie Harper got five seasons. Despite reaching two Sweet 16s and never having worse than a 6-seed in the NCAA Tournament, she was fired by athletic director Danny White after going 20-13 in 2023-24.
Caldwell likely won’t get a fourth season if her third Tennessee team isn’t dramatically improved from the one that crumbled this past season, leaving an empty roster, and that probably wasn’t a bad thing.
“I don’t necessarily know that we wanted a clean slate,” she said, “but we were not necessarily surprised that we had one.”
So what on earth happened to the mighty Lady Vols?
Caldwell talked about it. Again. She took blame. “I tried to swing too hard too fast,” she said, and that she “tried to change too much.” She “chased rankings” in recruiting last season’s roster, recruiting “all the same type of player.”
Tennessee women’s basketball coach Kim Caldwell speaks during the annual Big Orange Caravan event at Marathon Music Works in Nashville, Tenn., Wednesday, April 29, 2026.
“They were great players,” Caldwell said. “But they all wanted to do the same thing, and we really needed to construct this roster in a way where you had players, they could play different roles.”
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White has continued to back Caldwell, whom he hired initially and called “a brilliant basketball mind” during the Nashville caravan stop.
“Sometimes as a coach and as a leader,” White said, “you get stuck in a set of circumstances, and it doesn’t change the fact there’s another game coming up in two days. I think she’s known for quite some time the things that needed to be addressed and changed, and she . . . identified the issues and quickly took action and made some hard decisions and some pretty significant changes to get back on track.”
On April 29, former West Virginia forward Riley Makalusky became Caldwell’s 13th and final addition in the transfer portal. “We’re done,” she told host Mike Keith on stage at the Big Orange Caravan, indicating that the Lady Vols’ roster is full again.
Caldwell said she adjusted her focus in recruiting from trying to sell players on what Tennessee’s program could do for them and instead wanted to find out how committed they were to helping the Lady Vols.
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“The biggest thing is we wanted to recruit heart and people that wanted to work hard and people that knew what was at stake,” she said. “We really tried to hammer that home in our visits of how hard it was going to be and see if they were up for the challenge, and they all were.”
One could perceive that as an implication of last season’s Tennessee players not being up for the challenge. Caldwell was careful not to say that exactly. She doesn’t want to blame others.
Even as she acknowledged what was percolating underneath that smile and pleasant demeanor.
“There’s not a coach in the country,” Caldwell said, “that has a bigger chip on their shoulder and something to prove than I do.”
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Reach Tennessean sports columnist Gentry Estes at gestes@tennessean.com and hang out with him on Bluesky @gentryestes.bsky.social
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Kim Caldwell reflects on awful finish for Tennessee women’s basketball
