Lady Vols basketball coach Kim Caldwell has earned a 5-seed in the NCAA Tournament during her first year with Tennessee.

This places it against 12-seed USF in the opening round in Columbus, Ohio.

Here is everything Caldwell said on Monday afternoon.

TALK ABOUT IT IN THE ROCKY TOP FORUM

It was really good. He came to the hotel and was at the SEC Tournament. He came last night for the selections show. So he was well-behaved and it all went well.

It's great. There was a long period where I was pregnant for a long time and was gone for a few days, had a baby and then you come back and they hadn't gotten to meet him so I, it was really special for them to finally get to meet him.

It was a fun atmosphere. It was a fun environment. We have a tough opponent and we gotta make sure that we continue to fix us and hopefully we can represent Tennessee well.

We really needed the rest. We look better now. We look more crisp. We look kind of like we did at the end of December, which is what we needed.

You can't face them if you don't win the first one.

They're very offensive heavy. They run a lot of sets. Our half-court defense has to get a lot better. We did not look great today in practice with our half-court defense and just making sure that we sit down, we guard, we talk, we play as a team.

I think we need to get stops. I think everything about us right now starts on the defensive end and getting steals or getting stops and then being able to push and transition and so we're gonna have to be all on the same page, all play together, be able to play through mistakes.

We're able to go longer and harder and they're having fun and they're being competitive, which we kind of had hit a wall there where we were just kind of running through the mud and so they look a little more fresh, a little crisper.

It took a couple days so we needed to rest. So you rest first and then you try to get them back into it and so we did that. We had two days off, we had two skill days, kind of lighter days and then we've kind of ramped it up and we're about to the point where we're about to taper it back down.

Oh, it's great. It's great. It's beautiful anytime. I mean today we had probably two minutes where they're just squabbling with each other. Not in a negative way, but they're just arguing over fouls or whose ball it is and they're just really getting back to their roots of being a competitive program.

They're tired but they're competing. They're having fun. There's high energy. You would be able to, we always say if there's somebody up in the concourse, they're gonna think a game is going on, shoes are squeaking, there's loud energy and they're gonna look down and they're gonna see what's going on. They're not, it's not just a dead gym.

I think you need to have a team that is a hundred percent locked in and that every single player on the roster wants to win more than they care about getting through a practice or their feet hurting or the how many points they score or anything else. You have to be selfless and everyone has to just put everything they have into the last few weeks.

I mean the thing that separated them, everyone would come up to me and say, how do you win a national championship? How do you win a national championship? And we had, I think we had 12 or 13, maybe 14 seniors on that team and so everyone was all in. There was no next year and that's how we approached everything of there is no next year you don't get to do this again. And when you can have a team that has that mindset of it's everything right now, all or nothing, you never get to do it again, you're pretty hard to beat.

We're a senior heavy, I think. I definitely think we have that. I think we are kind of turning the page right now of, hey, it's about winning

Yeah, same thing. I think that they are getting to the point where it's about winning. It's about something bigger than themselves and that's when we are at our best.

I don't tell them a whole lot of stories about that national championship team. You know, I don't really know that they care. I think that it's about them. It's about where we are. I think we have enough history in this program right here. And when we tell stories, we tell stories of what we have learned and what we know about former Lady Vols and what they did to win their national championships.

It's to be determined. Hopefully, it gets a lot better and I hope that it's a team that is resilient. A team that had some adversity and then they took some time and they fixed it and they figured it out and I think there's still more left to our story.

I think everyone steps up in their separate ways. I think the person who has stepped up the most has been Tess Darby and she has been a completely different player since our SEC tournament.

She's vocal, she's playing harder, she's having fun, she's talking a little trash in practice, which is not really in her character. She's leading, she's telling people, she's putting people in the right spot, she wants to win. And she came to me and she said she wants to win, she wants to win for her teammates. She knows she doesn't have a career after this. She knows that she has a few weeks of basketball left and she wants to win to make Tennessee proud, but she wants to win for her teammates so they can get their individual goals, which I thought was just such a great statement.

I think everyone respects her. She comes in every single day, she works hard, she doesn't ever take a play off. She makes all of her sprints and she's a senior. And again, she's not a selfish player. Everything is for somebody else. And when you have a player that will sit there and say that, it's hard to look at them in the face and not do anything but play hard for them.

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