Lady Vols head coach Kim Caldwell shares the emotional message she sent her team after loss to Texas in Sweet 16

Kim Caldwell’s first season as the head coach of the Lady Vols ended on Saturday in Birmingham with a 67-59 loss to the Texas Longhorns.

Tennessee went 24-10 in Caldwell’s first season at the helm. The Lady Vols beat UConn for the first time since 2007 and played a couple of great teams (LSU, South Carolina, Texas, etc) down to the wire over the course of the season.

All in all, it was an incredibly successful debut season for Caldwell, who was a relatively unknown coach before Tennessee athletic director Danny White hired her to replace Kellie Harper last April.

But despite all the good things that Tennessee will take from the 2024-25 season, the loss to Texas, which prevented the Lady Vols from reaching their first Elite Eight since 2016, is still painful for Caldwell and her players.

After the game, while speaking with reporters, Caldwell shared the emotional message that she delivered in the Lady Vols’ locker room following the loss to Texas.

“I told them to keep their heads up,” said Caldwell. “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 (Darby) also said the same thinking. 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 [in] 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’s 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 so they have no reason to hang their head.”

The 2024-25 Lady Vols are a lot like the 2021 Tennessee football team (Josh Heupel’s first team at UT). This year’s Lady Vols squad set the foundation for success moving forward. And the players that stayed at UT and bought into Caldwell’s culture and vision will be largely responsible for any success the Lady Vols enjoy in the coming years, which is something that Caldwell was quick to point out on Saturday.

“Any success that we have at Tennessee from here on out is because of this team,” noted Caldwell.

This Lady Vols team may have come up short against Texas, but as Caldwell said, they have nothing to hang their heads about.

“I think they gave me everything they had. Every single ounce of anything they had, I think they gave it for this program.”