Kim Caldwell wasn’t wrong when she said on the eve of the NCAA tournament that her Tennessee squad and N.C. State were both different teams than when they met in November’s season opener.
Presumably, she didn’t mean the Lady Vols had regressed. Yet again, maybe she left that one open to interpretation.
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Tennessee went winless in March for the first time in its program’s storied history on Friday when the 10-seed’s season ended in a 76-61 loss to No. 7 N.C. State in the Fort Worth 3 regional. Conversely, the margin in November was one possession. This was only the team’s third loss in the first round of the tournament (35-3) and concluded an eight-game losing skid that can no longer be attributed to a difficult SEC schedule.
The vibes have been wrong for months, the play on the court wilted and the drama off of it escalated. Blame spread quicker and more widely than the Lady Vols’ stagnant offense. It landed on players’ effort and will, then the coaches, and Caldwell’s unique offensive approach.
Caldwell’s “hockey-style substitution” approach that won her an NCAA championship at the DII level can be polarizing. As the losses mounted, it drew the ire of Rocky Top. The press lacked, the pace stalled and the players appeared lost. A year ago, a 20-point deficit could turn into a thrilling comeback. This year, a 20-point deficit could and would balloon into a record losing margin.
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Late on Friday night in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Caldwell pulled all of it onto herself.
“I fell into my own trap,” Caldwell said. “And once you’re in it, you can’t get out of it.”
The turning point of the year, at least publicly, came when Caldwell called out her team for its “quit” in a record 93-50 loss to South Carolina on Feb. 8. It was their third loss in four games after starting 14-3 and 6-0 in the SEC.
The Lady Vols never recovered and barely made the NCAA tournament. It would have been a historic miss, as they’ve played in every once since the NCAA began governing women’s sports in 1982.
The behind-the-scenes turning point in the wrong direction likely came when Caldwell “bailed” on her system, a no-no she constantly tells other coaches seeking to emulate it. She put a “Plan B” into her system for the first time in her career, and everything cratered. The secondary approach dropped the full-court press, allowed players to stay on the floor longer (versus short spurts to keep up-tempo), and slowed the game down in transition.
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It happened around midseason — January or early February.
“You can’t play this style of play and put in a Plan B, and we put in a Plan B and when you do that you lose your identity, you lose your buy-in, you lose your staff a little bit,” Caldwell said.
Check, check, check. Reassessment has already arrived in Knoxville. It was the worst season of Caldwell’s professional career, and one that won’t be tolerated at a legacy Tennessee program that wanted to become one of the elites again.
Caldwell, who signed an extension through 2030 last year, backed up her staff on Friday, and noted the transfer portal makes for an interesting time. There will be changes coming.
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It appears a foregone conclusion that a contingent of players will enter the transfer portal. Caldwell didn’t exactly go into why she implemented Plan B, but it would seem that a lack of success in Plan A forced it. Not everyone will succeed in this style.
“Like Coach Kim said a lot, this is an effort-based program,” Talaysia Cooper said. “If you don’t want to work hard, if you don’t want to press, don’t think about coming here. Because this is what she does and she’s not changing it.”
Cooper led the team in scoring (15.7 points per game) and minutes (26.1), though the last month, she’s been caught in frustrating situations. After a benching in the SEC tournament game, she was not made available in the postgame locker room after walking out with a staffer. The TV cameras showed her irritated on the bench in the first-round loss.
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Freshman guard Mia Pauldo received praise from Caldwell entering the game as the player who had grown the most since the season-opening loss to NC State. Her twin sister, Mya Pauldo, is also rostered as a member of the top-10 recruiting class.
The Lady Vols’ 2026 recruiting class is also ranked top-10 by ESPN and includes No. 2-ranked recruit Oliviyah Edwards, a high school dunking star talked up by Lady Vols legend Candace Parker. Edwards posted an Instagram story earlier in the year amid Tennessee’s struggles asserting her commitment to the team, and ahead of Friday night’s game, shared Tennessee’s Instagram post simply titled, “March.”
The two are synonymous, Tennessee and March. A different team entirely needs to show up this time next year to keep it that way.
