It’s been a less-than-ideal two-week stretch for head coach Karen Weekly and her Tennessee softball team.
The Lady Vols started the 2026 season with a dominant stretch, going 28-1 over their first 29 games of the season. They’ve since lost four of their last six contests, all coming against conference opponents.
“I think it’s true about everybody in the SEC that they are better than their record,” Weekly said. “I don’t think our players took Ole Miss for granted at all, because they’re aware it’s the SEC.”
The Lady Vols dropped a rough series to Ole Miss at home — who earned its first conference wins over the Lady Vols — and now the schedule turns over to South Carolina (22-15, 2-7) for another home three-game series. It remains without question that the SEC stands as one of the nation’s premier softball conferences, featuring 11 teams ranked in the D1 Softball top 25.
Seven of those teams currently stand in the top 10, with the Lady Vols currently slotted at No. 5 in the nation.
“I mean, everybody’s good,” sophomore pitcher Erin Nuwer said. “It’s great to be in this league because iron sharpens iron, and everybody’s just making one another so much better, and I think these games are fun. Playing against the best competition is something you all dream about doing for so long.”
Amid the losing streak, there has been one major struggle that Weekly can draw the losses back to: the offense.
“When games are so close, it magnifies one or two things that could have gone either way,” Weekly said. “The games that, for the most part, we’ve lost, we’ve struggled to produce runs.”
In the team’s five losses this season, they’ve failed to score more than two total runs in any of the contests. But that isn’t indicative of a lack of talent.
Through 35 games, Sophia Knight leads the team in batting average, hitting .447 with eight doubles. Mckenzie Butt has also impressed; both she and Knight transferred to Tennessee this offseason from Boise State. While Knight adds the contact, Butt brings the power to the plate. She has muscled seven home runs this season, which ties Alannah Leach for a team lead in the category.
Yet even with the firepower, the team has seen a drawback in production over the last two series played against Florida and Ole Miss.
“Just taking a check in on the season as a whole,” Weekly said. “Talking about what you have learned about yourself to this point in the season, what have you learned about our team, and getting us sort of to take a step back and get some perspective on things.”
The perspective is important because even with the team’s worst stretch of the season, they still sit within striking distance of the top teams in the conference.
“I’m a big fan of adversity,” Weekly said. “When we haven’t had adversity, and I look back at those seasons, I was remiss as a coach not to create it. You have to have some adversity happen to you during the season, so that you can figure out who you are.”
The season is far from over, but the adversity Weekly desires is here. A three-game series against South Carolina is a chance to get the team back on track at home.
“There was a sense of, we’re back home from a tough road series, we’ll be fine,” Weekly said. “South Carolina is the same way.
I mean, they’re a really, really good team, a team that was also close to getting to the World Series last year, and even though they graduated players, they still have players from that team that have that experience, are really good coaching staff.”
