Lady Vols cast lot with Caldwell

Tennessee women's basketball has come across hard times, by Lady Vols' standards.

Sure, under Holly Warlick and Kellie Harper, the Lady Vols have managed to limp into the NCAA women's tournament a few times, a couple of times when I wasn't sure they deserved it. Of course, a lot of that is the committee living in the past. I think Tennessee's No. 6 seed this year was undeserved.

The sad thing is Tennessee women's basketball isn't feared, nor respected anymore. It's just another game on the schedule for most teams and with the Jekyll-Hyde inconsistency that has beleaguered the Lady Vols lo these past 12 years or so, Tennessee has won some surprising games and lost some games it shouldn't have...or wouldn't have in the old days.

Case in point. When legendary coach Pat Summitt took over the Lady Vols back in 1974, her first victory was against Middle Tennessee State University...in front of 53 people. Thanks to Pat, now, many women's college teams are packing their gyms.

Fast forward to 2023, the Lady Vols lost to that same MTSU team. That should never happen. But it did.

I cautioned folks not to get too high about Harper's hire. I think it was a feel-good hire by then AD Phillip Fulmer. We've seen how majority of his hires have gone. Let's hope baseball coach Tony Vitello isn't a ticking time bomb. People ostracized me for cautioning about the Harper hire, some telling me she was going to bring the Lady Vols back from the pit of mediocrity.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like it when a university has to turn on one of its own, but in this era of big-time college athletics, it's a business, now more than ever. UT athletics director Danny White had to go in a different direction, or he was going to lose donor support.

Did I mention college athletics was a business?

With all the elite coaching candidates nestled snugly in other precincts, and turning their basketball teams into national powers, there wasn't much to choose from out there this time around. White rolled the dice this time.

He picked Marshall coach Kim Caldwell. Her Thundering Herd just won the Sun Belt title and went to the NCAA tournament for the first time in school history. Before that, she was head coach at D-2 Glenville State, her alma mater, where she led them to Division 2 national title.

Going from D-2 to Sun Belt to the big-time world of the Southeastern Conference is a big leap, but thus far, White has had several plate appearances when it comes to coaching hires. So far, he's made contact.

Picking Caldwell was a roll of the dice. She's somewhat unproven, but apparently a rising star in the women's college basketball world. She likes to run an up-tempo offense, which will be exciting for the fans. Her biggest task right now is recruiting.

She's going to have to repopulate the roster, which will be a tough task. Except for potential NIL money, girls playing high school basketball only know about the Lady Vols and Pat Summit as an entry in a sports history book. In their lifetime, Tennessee hasn't been the powerhouse it once was.

As a result, prospects aren't as eager to join the Lady Vols as they once were. You could make the same case for UConn, too, though they are a bit ahead of the Lady Vols at this point. Dawn Staley of South Carolina and Kim Mulkey of Louisiana State have recently won national titles. Tennessee has barely sniffed an Elite Eight spot and were defeated in the second round of the tournament this year.

Summit is partly responsible for the mess Tennessee is in. Before you start throwing stones at me, it's not what you think. Summit made women's basketball a big-time production. As a result, you've seen the rise of teams like Stanford, Connecticut, South Carolina, LSU, Mississippi State, Purdue, Duke and several others. Summitt didn't just make Tennessee great, she created an environment where so many more programs can be great.

Caldwell knows this. The history of the Lady Vols isn't lost on her. She knows she is facing an uphill battle with high expectations, some unrealistic in the short term. She'll be given time to put her smell on the program. It probably isn't going to be a quick fix, but when people see what kind of product she puts on the floor, she might be able to exhume this program faster than people think. Again, even though she has 217 career victories, she's relatively untested. As I said, White rolled the dice by selecting her for the job.

For Lady Vols' fans out there, I hope they don't come up snake eyes.

Jim Steele is a correspondent for Magic Valley Publishing.