Kim Caldwell has a new team and still plenty to prove with Lady Vols | Estes

Yahoo Sports1h ago15 min readOriginal source →

TL;DR

Kim Caldwell is starting fresh with a new team after a challenging season with the Lady Vols. She aims to turn the page on a disappointing past and prove herself in Tennessee's women's basketball program.

Key points

Kim Caldwell is starting with a new team.
The Lady Vols had an eight-game losing streak last season.
Caldwell aims to prove last season was an outlier.
Tennessee's women's basketball program is prestigious.
The team faced an exodus of players.

Mentioned in this story

TennesseeKim Caldwell

Lady Vols

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.

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 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.