The Lady Vols will close out 2024 with one more home game and then start 2025 on the road for SEC play.

The players spent a few days at home for the holidays before returning to campus to prepare for Winthrop this Sunday, Dec. 29, at 2 p.m. at Thompson-Boling Arena at Food City Center. Tickets are available HERE for those ready for some Lady Vols basketball between the December holidays and New Year’s Day.

Tennessee is now 11-0 and ranked No. 15 by AP voters and No. 13 in the coaches’ poll.

“We’re going to get back and we’re going to have really hard practices,” Tennessee coach Kim Caldwell said. “And we’re going to try to get in shape and use that game as a tune-up to get all the shakes out, the jitters out and then go into SEC play.”

Conference play starts on the road Thursday, Jan. 2, at Texas A&M – College Station has been a weather-plagued trip of late for Tennessee – and then home games against No. 9/10 Oklahoma on Sunday, Jan. 5, and No. 6/12 LSU on Thursday, Jan. 9.

The 2024-25 team has proven to be resilient – wins over Florida State, which is receiving votes, and still-ranked Iowa showed that – and with that comes confidence.

“I definitely feel like it is,” Sara Puckett said before the break when asked if the team’s new style of high-octane play will hold up in the SEC. “Because we know we’re good enough to do it in the SEC, the best conference in the nation.”

Puckett is a senior and thus a veteran of SEC matchups. What separates the SEC from the rest of the country is that there is not a gimme game ever. Every team, top to bottom, has a shot at an upset each game. The speed and physicality of the SEC are at another level, and it has to be experienced firsthand to be learned.

Jewel Spear is a fifth-year senior and in her second and final season at Tennessee after transferring from Wake Forest. Spear was one of the players who needed to see live action in the SEC to understand. She’s ready for it now.

The Lady Vols added five transfers last spring, and Talaysia Cooper became eligible after sitting out a season. But Cooper played at South Carolina as a true freshman, so she gets it, too. Samara Spencer transferred to Tennessee from Arkansas, so she understands. Tennessee will need Zee Spearman (Miami), Ruby Whitehorn (Clemson), Alyssa Latham (Syracuse) and Favor Ayodele (Pitt) to be quick studies.

Sara Puckett and Samara Spencer celebrate during a game. (Ryan Beatty/Tennessee Athletics)

The SEC, this writer has often said, is a league for grown women. And the conference somehow got even tougher with the addition of Oklahoma and Texas. The likelihood of any team emerging unscathed in SEC play is lower than ever now.

Add the target that Tennessee always has on its back – even when the Lady Vols struggled in league play of late, teams that beat them celebrated like they had won it all – and the bullseye just got bigger with a new coach. The veteran coaches in the SEC don’t want to lose to Tennessee and Caldwell in her debut season.

Tennessee fans are riding high right now and understandably so. The team has been energized by the infusion of a new staff and new portal faces who blended very well with the returning players.

The point guards share the ball with Spencer leading the way with 61 assists and Cooper at 41, part of a team total of 194. Spencer has just 16 turnovers for an assist-to-turnover ratio of 3.81. Anything above 2.1 is considered very good.

This team also is competitive on and off the court. Tennessee played two games in Florida before the holiday break and used a hotel ballroom for a gingerbread house contest as shown below.

Caldwell will welcome the third Meek as Semeka Randall brings her Winthrop Eagles to Knoxville. She met Tamika Catchings when the former Lady Vol called a game in Knoxville and Chamique Holdsclaw in New York when Tennessee played Iowa. The Meeks are Lady Vol royalty, especially the undefeated 39-0 team in 1997-98 that changed how the game was played. That team relied on speed, pressure defense and talented offensive players who became All-Americans.

Caldwell is trying to recapture that essence amid a sport that has reached parity with multiple teams across the country contending for a spot in the Final Four. Parity is exactly what the late Pat Summitt wanted. She wouldn’t necessarily recognize the SEC now – in most of her time there were maybe two teams that had any shot at beating Tennessee in any given season – but she would be smiling.

Buckle up, everyone. The SEC is going to be quite a ride.

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.