The Tennessee Lady Vols are 2-0 to start the season, and what I have observed is the hard hat mentality this team possesses. Not everything will look pretty. Sometimes it may look like organized chaos, but that is often the mark of a team that just wants to work hard and make things happen. It’s a bit of a gift and a curse, and it comes with playing aggressive ball, especially in the press. This team is going to make mistakes because it plays hard, and so far it has shown it can clean them up during a game.
Thursday night in Baltimore, Tennessee led just 12-10 after one quarter. Aaliyah Moore, Kaylene Smikle and Fats Janneh each picked up two fouls in the opening period, shots at the rim weren’t falling and Coppin State’s pressure had the Lady Vols playing a bit sped up. Then Tennessee won the second quarter 30-17 and the third 33-12 on the way to a 98-60 win. The press that looked shaky early forced 29 turnovers, and the Lady Vols turned them into 32 points.
Caldwell rebuilt this roster with players she says think the way she thinks. A first road game against a team that forced some sloppiness and affected the pace, was the first real test of whether that would hold up when things got a bit hard.
“I was confident all night tonight that we were going to be able to turn it around,” Caldwell said. “We had a timeout when things were still neck and neck, and I sat there and said, ‘Guys, we’re going to win the game. We just have to have the confidence to do that.’ I’m able to say that with conviction because of who they’ve been every single day in practice.”
It’s early, and it can be easy to point out the missteps or things that need correcting, as they should. But what stood out to me is how quickly this group recognized them. Gabby Minus didn’t need a film session to know what went wrong. Two games into her college career, the freshman owned her first quarter shot selection right away.
“I definitely believe we were a little sped up, myself included, with some of the shot selections I took,” Minus said. “But then I got with Coach Kim, and she just said, ‘Slow down, just breathe and see the court. See everybody. We work together. We’re going to get through this game.’”
Minus didn’t let a rough start get in her head. She kept attacking the paint, and it paid off at the free throw line, where she scored 10 of her 12 points. She also got great positioning on the glass and finished with a double-double, adding 11 rebounds. Taking contact at the rim when the jumper isn’t falling is the hard hat approach in its simplest form, and seeing a freshman figure that out this early is encouraging for her and for the program’s future.
Aaliyah Moore, the sixth-year transfer forward from Texas, battled. She picked up two fouls in the first quarter and still found 19 minutes, yet she was still Tennessee’s leading scorer at halftime. Whether it’s in the post, on the perimeter, or defensively, Moore will leave a mark on the game. She finished with 11 points, three steals, two assists, two rebounds and one block, and she knocked down two 3-pointers.
The stoppages hurt Tennessee as much as anything Coppin State did. Caldwell’s system depends on being fast paced, with constant substitutions and a press that needs live balls to feed it. Every whistle in the first half gave Coppin State a chance to reset, and Moore pointed to that as the biggest hurdle.
“For the team, it was a little bit difficult because the game kept getting stopped,” Moore said. “As a team, we want to play fast, and we want to score quick, and it was foul after foul, call after call. So we had to adjust. Obviously, we’re not going to have a game where it’s just run and gun the whole time, so I think it was good for us to get a taste of that early and learn how to bounce back from it.”
The Lady Vols will see tougher, more physical games than this one, with UCLA coming to Knoxville on Nov. 22 and a trip to face UConn on Dec. 12. Winning a game that wasn’t pretty in the first week of November is a good thing to have under their belt before then. As the season goes on, I’m excited to see how this team continues to put in the work and improve.
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