Monday gets a bad reputation, but when it comes to Lady Vols basketball the first day of week has brought great news for Tennessee for the second week in a row.
The latest reason that fans are smiling is that Rickea Jackson announced Monday during a radio interview on the Sports Animal with Brian Rice – the voice of the Lady Vols – that she would return for a fifth season in college. Projected as a top pick in the WNBA draft in April, the 6-2 senior instead opted to wear orange for a second time at Tennessee.
“I have been so happy during my time on Rocky Top,” Jackson posted on social media. “I am so grateful for my teammates and coaches and the endless bonds that I’ve created while being here. I appreciate all the support from our amazing fans for making this transition to the University of Tennessee so worth it. But we are not done yet. I’m coming back for another year.”
Jackson was on the radio Tuesday with Tamari Key, who announced last week on Monday that she would return in the 2023-24 season in a story here. Key’s 2022-23 season ended last December because of blood clots in her lungs.
Both players appeared on the show to also talk about the NCAA tourney. Key and Jackson set up the surprise well with both talking about the fan support and the benefits of the Lady Vol Boost Her Club for female athletes at Tennessee.
“Of course the WNBA is a huge dream of mine, and I look forward to taking that next step, but that dream is going to have to wait because I am coming back to the Lady Vols for another season,” Jackson said Monday on the radio. “I wanted to announce today so I would not have any distractions with March Madness.”
Rickea Jackson dribbles against Kentucky during a game in Lexington. (Kate Luffman/Tennessee Athletics)
At that point, pandemonium broke out on social media and message boards. Jackson is Tennessee’s leading scorer at 19.6 points per game and earned First Team All-SEC honors. Her game is ready for the professional ranks – Jackson can thread the tiniest opening and get to the basket and score and has a nearly un-guardable fadeaway and turn-around jumper – but she wasn’t quite ready to leave Tennessee. The full radio interview can be heard here.
March Madness for the Lady Vols starts this Saturday, March 18, after Tennessee earned a No. 4 seed in the NCAA Tournament and the right to host the early rounds. Tipoff at Thompson-Boling Arena will be at 1 p.m. against No. 13 seed St. Louis University, and tickets are available here.
The 41 speaks for itself.
Following the first game, No. 5 seed Iowa State will meet No. 12 seed Toledo. The winners will face off Monday evening at a time to be determined for a Sweet 16 berth in Seattle.
Since the women’s NCAA tourney started in 1982, Tennessee is the only team in the country to have earned a bid for all 41 events. It would have been 42, but the tourney was canceled in 2020 due to the pandemic. The next closest streak is Stanford at 35 straight appearances; UConn, 34; Notre Dame, 27; and Baylor, 19.
But the Lady Vols will remain the only team in contention to never miss the NCAA tourney since its debut in 1982.
Jackson will be playing in her first NCAA tourney after she spent her first three seasons at Mississippi State. As a freshman in 2019-20 when Mississippi State was a top 10 team in the country, the pandemic shuttered sports a week before the tourney would have started. In 2020-21 and 2021-22, Mississippi State didn’t make the field.
It’s the fourth spring break of Jackson’s college career and the first one for her that involves postseason basketball instead of just a week without classes.
“Get to stay in Knoxville, probably go shopping or something the day before the game, that always helps,” Jackson said. “It’s pretty cool.”
Last November when Tennessee was struggling to find wins, a No. 4 seed in the NCAA tourney seemed a longshot. But the Lady Vols stayed together and found a way to change course.
“We knew the team that we could be, we knew we had to overcome so much, so we just stuck together,” Jackson said. “And it was tough. It was really tough.”
The women’s basketball committee in charge of the brackets, which were unveiled Sunday night, rewarded Tennessee for its tough non-conference schedule and appeared to penalize LSU for its weak opponents outside of the SEC. LSU is a No. 3 seed, just one above Tennessee despite LSU’s 28-2 record compared to 23-11 for the Lady Vols. Tennessee also beat LSU in the semifinals of the SEC tourney, an outcome that likely catapulted the Lady Vols into a No. 4 slot.
The committee chair, Lisa Peterson, pointed out that in the final month before the brackets were finalized, Tennessee lost just twice – in both cases to South Carolina, the overall No. 1 seed in the tourney and unbeaten at 32-0.
Peterson noted that the Lady Vols “really challenged themselves in the non-conference.” The message was clear: Want a higher seed? Put together a worthy schedule of opponents before conference play begins. Tennessee may have gone a bit overboard, but it worked.
In this space a week ago, the success of the softball and tennis teams was noted – and it has continued unabated. The softball team is now 20-1 overall and 3-0 in the SEC after sweeping Ole Miss in the opening series of conference play. The home run tally for Kiki Milloy is now 12 on the season, and it included a grand slam. Part of the celebration at home plate is a pretend photo opp.
Softball celebrates a home run. (Tennessee Athletics)
The SEC’s Freshman of the Week honor might as well be renamed for Karlyn Pickens, as the rookie earned it for the third week in a row after throwing a one-hit complete-game shutout in her first-ever SEC game. Milloy earned SEC Player of the Week honors after hitting .625 over four games with an eye-popping 1.750 slugging percentage, .786 on-base percentage, three stolen bases, eight runs scored and eight RBIs with four coming on one swing of the bat.
Tennessee is stepping out of conference tonight (March 15) with a game against Austin Peay in Columbia, Tennessee, for the Midstate Classic before traveling to LSU for a three-game series in Baton Rouge on March 17-19.
The tennis team swept Vanderbilt and Kentucky last Friday and Sunday on the road and is now 11-2 overall and 4-0 in the SEC.
“What a weekend,” head coach Alison Ojeda said. “Any time you can return to Knoxville with two SEC road wins, you know you did something well.”
Maria M. Cornelius, a writer/editor at Moxley Carmichael 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.