A year ago, as the calendar turned to April, the Lady Vols were in between basketball coaches in what is the most coveted job in the country. The mothership of the sport thanks to the legacy of the late Pat Summitt, it would become just the second coaching search in the history of the program.

Enter Kim Caldwell, a relatively unknown coach in Division I women’s basketball who packed quite a résumé while toiling in the lower levels.

My first reaction? That’s an intriguing hire. It was followed by researching as much as I could find about Caldwell. The more I found – especially the high-octane approach – the more intrigued I became. My default position in life and basketball is a let’s-see-how-it-goes approach. It has served me well in all arenas to not get too high or too low. It’s also a function of being a lifelong observer as a journalist and watching and listening before reaching conclusions.

Caldwell’s hiring was followed by a fusillade of questions everywhere I went and via every form of messaging, which I wrote about HERE on April, 8, 2024, one day before she would officially be introduced as Tennessee’s new head coach. She aced the press conference, which I wrote about HERE for this site.

As the spring transfer portal unfolded in 2024 – Caldwell and her staff added five new players – and she went on the Big Orange Caravan tour, did media interviews and started summer workouts with her new team, the questions kept coming.

I encountered excitement, skepticism, doubt and anger. On the plus side, nobody was apathetic. A lot of folks also landed in that wait-and-see category. They were uncertain but willing to give her a chance. The skeptics, which ranged from mild to somewhat to full-on, typically were reasonable. The doubters also tended to be polite but with a tad more impassioned approach. The angry ones often were upset that Kellie Harper had been fired or livid that Caldwell had been chosen.

UT Chancellor Donde Plowman, coach Kim Caldwell and Vice Chancellor/Director of Athletics Danny White. (Tennessee Athletics)

A separate group would be those connected to the game. I have been in Knoxville since 1988 and have covered Tennessee women’s basketball in some capacity since 1998, traveled all across the country to do so and wrote a book about Summitt’s final season. That allowed me to get to know a lot of people and hear a lot of things.

A faction of folks, including some coaches, didn’t take the hiring well and outright wanted her to fail.

The news broke at the 2024 Final Four, which also is a gathering of thousands of coaches from across the country for their annual conference. Such a gathering and what is said leaks like a sieve, including the hiring of Caldwell which hit social media before Tennessee released it.

Summitt formed so many relationships during her career and often is a degree or two separated from someone else in the basketball version of the Kevin Bacon game. Those folks can feel a kinship to Tennessee and develop a form of protection. What got said about Tennessee, Danny White and Caldwell reached a lot of ears, including mine, and it continued all spring, summer, fall and into basketball season.

Coach Kim Caldwell tours the Lady Vols locker room. (UT Athletics)

From my point of view, White surely knows there are three cardinal sins at Tennessee – fail at football, Lady Vols basketball or Gentlemen Vols basketball. An athletics director that blows up either one with a bad hire won’t survive. For that reason, I presumed he had discovered something with Caldwell that made him willing to take the shot.

The angry faction reached Caldwell, too, as outlined in a mid-January interview that can be read HERE.

“I think what drives me is a mix between proving everyone wrong and then proving the people that believe in us right,”  Caldwell said in January. “It’s kind of half and half. I really want at the end of the year to have a good year, then for everyone that has something negative to say to kind of have to eat their words.

“And then I also have tried to do a better job of saying, ‘Hey, maybe you should spend more time trying to prove all the people that have supported you and encouraged you to take this job, and your players and your former players and the administration here, spend some time to try to prove them right, so that they look good.’

“And we have so many seniors on our team. They didn’t have to stay. They could have left the second they found out that there was going to be a coaching change, and they could have left when they read everything that they wanted to read on the internet about how I wasn’t qualified. And they believed in me, and they chose to stay. And I want them to have a really successful year because of that, because I think they deserve it.”

The Lady Vols beat UConn for the first time since the series restarted in 2020, returned to the top 25, reached the Sweet 16 with five other SEC teams and finished 24-10 in Caldwell’s debut season.

A high school recruiting class ranked No. 2 nationally – three of whom just played this week in the McDonald’s All-American game in Jaida Civil, Mia Pauldo and Deniya Prawl – will arrive in two months to start summer workouts. A core group of players is set to return, and the coaches will peruse the portal, too.

Caldwell navigated all of this while pregnant, and son Conor arrived January 20, 2025.

“I know that there are coaches that coach through things that are not blessing, sickness and deaths and all of those things,” Caldwell said after the last game. “I got to coach through blessing after blessing with a team that I love.”

LEGACY: The U.S. Basketball Writers Association presents “Most Courageous” awards every year for women’s and men’s basketball in honor of the late Pat Summitt and the late Perry Wallace. This year, the awards will go to the girls’ and boys’ basketball teams at Palisades Charter High School in California. Both teams, known as the Dolphins, completed winning seasons while dealing with the trauma of the January wildfires that destroyed much of their campus and left several players without homes.

The awards will be presented at the Final Four to coach Adam Levine and Elizabeth Tierney of the girls’ team in Tampa and coach Jeff Bryant and Julian Cunningham of the boys’ team in San Antonio.

“In the face of incredible challenges brought on by the Palisades Fire, our boys’ and girls’ basketball teams showed incredible grit, courage and team camaraderie in a chaotic time,” said Rocky Montz, the school’s athletic director. “Despite having no home facility for games or practices, our teams embraced traveling to different gyms, bringing energy and passion wherever they went.

“With many families losing everything due to the fires, no teammate was left behind. Both teams are a wonderful example of what we hope high school athletics can be, and we thank them all for the example they demonstrated for our community.”

Summitt coached for 38 years at Tennessee and led the Lady Vols to eight national championships; she coached her final season in 2011-12 after being diagnosed with early onset dementia. Perry Wallace integrated the SEC when he became the first Black varsity basketball player at Vanderbilt in 1967.

“Our awards are defined as demonstrating extraordinary courage reflecting honor on amateur basketball,” said Malcolm Moran, executive director of USBWA. “Although we had never honored a high school athlete, the decisions became very clear the more we learned about the hardships the teams had to overcome.”

Maria M. Cornelius, a senior writer/editor at MoxCar Marketing + Communications since 2013, started her journalism career at the Knoxville News Sentinel and began writing about the Lady Vols in 1998. In 2016, she published her first book, “The Final Season: The Perseverance of Pat Summitt,” through The University of Tennessee Press.