Lady Vol fans experienced both disappointment and awe over the weekend with basketball falling and softball seizing a rare series win at Oklahoma.

Kim Caldwell and her staff led Tennessee to the Sweet 16 before bowing out to No. 1 seed Texas. On Monday, Athletics Director Danny White extended her contract through March 31, 2030, as the metrics of success – unranked to start the season to as high as No. 11; highest attendance at a game since Pat Summitt’s final season – arrived in her debut year.

Softball shook off a tough series at home against Arkansas a week ago with two losses and one win and took two of three games at Oklahoma, a team that has won the last four national championships. It doesn’t take a full hand to count how many teams have won a series in Norman, because it’s just three – Texas in 2006, Oklahoma State in 2024 and Tennessee in 2025.

Karlyn Pickens went the distance in Sunday’s win with a three-run homer by redshirt freshman Ella Dodge in the fourth inning that put Tennessee ahead 5-3, and the score held. Tennessee also won the first game on Friday, 5-2, aided by freshman Amayah Doyle’s two-run dinger that brought home Dodge and put the Lady Vols up 2-0. That game went to extra innings, and a two-run homer by Sophia Nugent in the eighth inning became the game-winning runs.

Dodge and Doyle both hit in the bottom third of the lineup, along with sophomore Gabby Leach, and all three youngsters delivered against Oklahoma.

“I thought the bottom of lineup was super competitive,” said coach Karen Weekly, whose post-game comments can be watched HERE. “You start with Friday, with Amayah Doyle coming out and putting us on the board with that big blast. And Gabby follows it right up with the double. I feel like they had competitive at bats for the most part all weekend. That’s huge.

“Because honestly, the mark of a good team offensively is what do you do in the bottom half of your order and have the kind of batting lineup that a team can’t say, ‘Well, once we get past the first four, then we can rest easy.’ We got so many big swings and really great production and good at bats, just battling and being tough.”

Tennessee could have traveled to Norman and conceded to powerhouse Oklahoma. Instead, the Lady Vols competed.

“It says a ton about their resilience,” Weekly said. “And it speaks to what they want to be and who they want to be, that they’re willing to dig in, because when you get punched in the mouth, it’s pretty tough, and you’ve got to be willing to dig in and do some dirty work.”

Tennessee will play Western Carolina today, April 1, at 6 p.m. at Lee Stadium and then host Mississippi State for a three-game series April 4-6.

While basketball is now in the off-season, it’s also portal season, so coaches across the country are busy monitoring their rosters, meeting with players and perusing the portal for reinforcements.

Tennessee has lost to graduation three excellent three-point shooters in Tess Darby, Samara Spencer and Jewel Spear, who combined for 201 of Tennessee’s program record 343 made threes this season. The previous record was 242 treys in 2010-11. A shooting guard would be atop the list, along with help in the post, although it has to be a mobile one who can play in Caldwell’s up-tempo system.

Caldwell had a lot of doubters when she was hired a year ago. The refrain carried over into the season with some coaches questioning if her system would work in the SEC. She proved that it could, and the praise came from Texas coach Vic Schaefer, which had its hands full with Tennessee in the Sweet 16.

“She’s done an unbelievable job with that program in such a short period of time,” said Schaefer, who said as much to Caldwell after the game. “A lot of people didn’t think what she would do or how she is doing it was going to work. I think she has shown them they ain’t right. What they do and how they do it is very effective. Getting kids to buy into a system, she’s done it so fast.”

Caldwell is an infrequent poster on social media. She did so on Sunday.

After the final loss of the season, Caldwell fielded a question about what she told her team in the locker room. She can sometimes give short answers. That wasn’t the case this time.

“I told them to keep their heads up,” Caldwell said. “I told them that I am proud of them, that I am thankful for them. I know for a fact that God put this team together because this is the team that we needed to have. These are the people that I needed to have in my life, and we needed each other. Tess also said the same thing.

“I thanked them, and I told them that any success we have going forward is because of them. And they can be former Lady Vols, and they can cheer us on, and they can know that they helped build the foundation. And they set the tone, and they set what it was. They have a lot to be proud of year one. It hurts. It’s always hard when you have people whose career just ended. And it’s always a tough locker room, but again, I’m beyond proud of them. We hit some failure toward the last half of the season, and we let failure be a learning tool for us.

“We didn’t quit, we didn’t hang our heads. I do think we got better, from losing three of our last four games, and there is not a lot of teams that would have the resilience to get better and learn from that, and they did. They’ve just progressed so much from the time I started coaching them to now. I think they’re better humans. I think they’re tougher mentally, better basketball players, and they have no reason to hang their head.”

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.