Tennessee’s storied past grows fainter each season, and Sunday’s defeat to South Carolina highlighted how far the Lady Vols have fallen from their former glory.
Lady Vols head coach Kim Caldwell stood on the sideline while her Lady Vols posted a record-breaking 43-point loss to No. 3 South Carolina, scoring 93-50.
With the way things were starting off, it felt like the Lady Vols were in a solid position to keep the game competitive, but the team found itself leading 15-13 in the early goings of the first quarter.
Yet even with an early lead, the Gamecocks quickly took their lead back and never gave it back.
Janiah Barker and Talaysia Cooper started their day strong, combining for 14 points in the first quarter. The rest of the night, Barker scored just two more points, while Cooper finished with a team high of 17.
There’s a clear lack of leadership that has become more apparent with each loss, and Lady Vols head coach Kim Caldwell has become very vocal about that issue.
“I don’t necessarily know that they’re sitting there defeated,” Caldwell said. “I don’t know that. I do know we don’t have the leadership we need player-wise.”
After the loss to South Carolina on Sunday, the Lady Vols have now lost three of their last four contests, all of which have been lost by 15 points or more. It includes two of the three worst losses in program history.
“We just had a lot of quit in us tonight, and that’s been something that’s been consistent with our team, is we’re not comfortable and things don’t go our way, and I have a team that’ll just quit on you, and you can’t do that in big games,” Caldwell said. “You can’t do that anytime in the SEC, but you certainly can’t do that at a program like this.”
The Lady Vols’ last two losses have both been historically bad for the program, ranking first and third, with a 1984 loss to Texas straddling right in the middle.
Just a few days prior, on Feb. 3, the Lady Vols dropped their meeting against UConn by a margin of 30 points, just one point shy of a school record for the biggest deficit in a loss.
After a win against Georgia, the next ranked matchup came against none other than South Carolina, and the response was lackluster.
As a team, the Lady Vols shot 28% from the field, while allowing the Gamecocks to shoot 69%, even more impressive from the Gamecocks is that they did this while shooting 34 fewer 3-pointers than their opponent.
This team needs answers, and it seems like Caldwell doesn’t have them right now, as she turns to her team for a sense of leadership that simply cannot be found.
“We’ve talked about it for a couple of weeks,” Caldwell said. “It can come from anyone, anywhere, but we do need somebody who is respected and does things the right way to step up and lead this team from a player standpoint.”
There was simply no spark, no energy or fire from anyone on the team after the first quarter. The team scored a combined 18 points in the second half, which ties for the fifth-worst all-time total in second-half points for the Lady Vols.
Where things stand for Caldwell over halfway through her second season as head coach, she has already amassed four losses that fall within the top-10 worst deficits in team history.
Included in the list are both the UConn and South Carolina losses from this season, as well as Kentucky and Louisville last year.
When Gamecocks head coach Dawn Staley was asked how she’d approach this situation of “player quit” that Caldwell alluded to, Staley appeared reserved.
“I would say very rarely,” Staley said. “I mean, you can see for us, like, there won’t be quit. There might be some undisciplined play out there. There might be some just we don’t have it and we’re just on a gerbil wheel, working hard, but going nowhere, right? You can see some of that, and that’s correctable. For a young coach like Kim, coaching for the traditional powerhouse of Tennessee, for me, I probably wouldn’t say it publicly.”
With March nearing, there remain more questions than answers with Caldwell’s team. The team welcomes none other than former head coach Kellie Harper and the Missouri Tigers on Feb. 12.
