Lady Vols looking for resiliency in home finale
Following the Lady Vols worst loss of the season, head coach Kim Caldwell and her team finds themselves in a place they haven’t been at all season.
How does this team respond?
“I think it’s up to them,” Caldwell said. “It’s their legacy. It’s their story and it’s their season. It’s what they want to do. They can make up their minds and they can move on from this and it makes us better or they can’t sit on it. I think your job as a coach is to teach and your job as a coach is that your players mature. We have to grow up. We have to be resilient and we have to be mentally tough. We have to be able to handle failure in small doses because that what a game is and that’s what our games are because we have so many possessions. We will see if we can do that or not.”
Sunday, the Lady Vols return to the floor as they host Georgia in their regular season finale on Senior Day. But the Bulldogs are not the priority for Caldwell. It’s all about her team.
“We are going to watch this one,” Caldwell said on her post game radio show when asked about moving beyond the Kentucky loss. “This one is going to simmer. We have to fix us before we can talk about anyone else.”
“We will not burn the tape. We will watch it in slow motion.”
Caldwell’s biggest concern was seeing something she hadn’t seen from her team all year, a lack of fight and resiliency.
“I think the moment that sticks out with me is kind of the moment I just touched on,” Caldwell said. “Toward the end of the first, beginning of the second, is when I looked at them and they didn’t really look like they had a whole lot to give back. For the first time that I’ve really seen that out of them.
“We talked as a staff we haven’t looked like this in a while. We haven’t looked just kind of dead behind the eyes and defeated and just no resolve, no pushback.”
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Caldwell lamented the fact that her team let disappointment on the offensive end turn into disaster on the defensive end of the floor.
“When things are going great and we are hitting shots, we are doing exactly what we need to be doing,” Caldwell said. “This team is not going to go very far if the ball going in the hole dictates how hard they are going to play on defense and that’s across the board.”
Georgia comes in off a win over Auburn Thursday night, but the Bulldogs are winless on an opponent’s floor this season.
For Caldwell’s team, it starts with getting off to a better starts. Tennessee has trailed at the end of the first quarter in five of their last seven games.
Tip is set for noon ET with coverage on the SEC Network.
