Zee Spearman had one of her best games of the season against Ohio State for Lady Vols basketball to advance to the Sweet 16.
The junior forward was aggressive, took good shots and scored an extremely efficient 17 points. But Tennessee coach Kim Caldwell was most proud of how Spearman was a great teammate in one of the toughest games of the season.
“We clipped it up and showed it on film,” Caldwell said Wednesday. “She got frustrated for a second, and then went out of her way to give people high fives. She’s running to pick people up off the floor. When you’re in a tough environment on the road, which all of ours will be from here on out, you need to be a good teammate.”
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No. 5 seed Tennessee (24-9) will have another tough matchup against No. 1 Texas (33-3) in the Sweet 16 on Saturday (3:30 p.m. ET, ABC) at Legacy Arena in Birmingham, Alabama.
Caldwell saw her team take an important step during the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament. And Spearman was a perfect example of it.
Ohio State went on a 16-0 run in the third quarter to erase what was once a 17-point lead for Tennessee. Caldwell doesn’t think they took their foot off the gas, she knew a run would happen against a good team. But what she saw out of the Lady Vols when they got hit was important – their huddles were tight, they were playing as a team and had “great energy.”
Showing positive body language and being a good teammate on film is always something Caldwell has done. They showed all those moments from the Ohio State game in film, when they huddled up between plays, especially if their opponent wasn’t huddling in that moment.
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“To see that when we were getting hit was a big step for this program,” Caldwell said. “It’s a step that we needed.”
Caldwell knew from the beginning when she met her team that it was capable of making a postseason run because it had a “hungry mindset.” They may have lost that along the way, but the Lady Vols showed Caldwell enough that she believes they found it again.
SWEET 16 AGAIN: Lady Vols trusted ‘a winner is a winner’ when Kim Caldwell was hired. Now they’re in Sweet 16
It’s rare for a team to not check out when things get rocky, Caldwell said, whether it’s the players moving on to the next thing or assistant coaches moving on to recruiting their next class.
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“I think it says a lot about the resiliency of this program, from our assistant coaches to our players, that they cared enough about each other to just check back in and fix it,” Caldwell said. “As opposed to saying, ‘Oh, well, we failed.’ And they just figured it out … I’m happy we’re going to the Sweet 16. I’m proud of that, but I’m more proud of the way we looked on the floor.”
Cora Hall covers University of Tennessee women’s athletics. Email her at cora.hall@knoxnews.com and follow her on X @corahalll. If you enjoy Cora’s coverage, consider a digital subscription that allows you to access all of it.
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Tennessee-Texas: What Kim Caldwell film session showed Lady Vols
