Ahead of Kim Caldwell's regular season debut as the Lady Vols coach, she met with the media

Here's everything the Tennessee coach had to say.

TALK ABOUT IT IN THE ROCKY TOP FORUM

She has grown tremendously. She's gotten a lot better. Her first week was really rough on her. She didn't talk to anyone. She was just very quiet by herself. And now she has one of the biggest personalities on the team. She understands our press really well. She can get deflections, she can get seals. She just plays hard. She goes and gets offensive rebounds. And you can't really teach that type of effort.

I think our shot selection, our half court offense wasn't great. We shot well. But you sometimes as a coach have to say, 'Well, what if these shots aren't going in? How do we generate offense a little bit differently?' And so shot selection, more movement on offense. We have still been turning the ball over in practice a lot and so just making sure that we fix those things going forward."

It takes time. It takes a lot of film, a lot of time. And there's a lot of things when you play this way of, 'Hey, we're shooting great, but it comes in waves. Hey, we're not shooting great, so we have to work a little bit harder for our shots.' And so all of those things you can really only learn them in game situations. And so it takes, as I said, it takes some time.

I'm always nervous, always, and I will always be nervous. That's just the type of person that I am. And so, you know, you just prepare as much as you can prepare. But of course, as it gets close to the game time, no matter what, where, when we are, I'll be nervous.

It was really good to see the exhibition. That was great for us, to be able to just see the intros, to see the lights, to see the fan base, to hear how loud it was. So all of that was great.

That was awesome. Like, just nothing I've ever even seen before, so it was great.

She will push the tip over us, push pace. She rebounds the ball very well for a guard. She can defend. She's smart and I think she could score more. So we'd like to get her some more touches. And so she's a big piece of what we do.

Ruby's ceiling is really high. We're still working on things. And so that's one thing about playing here. Playing for me is we're not just going to take you as you are. We're going to try to continue to make you better. And so we're going to just continue to work with her, continue to push her, make her uncomfortable, so she she'll get better and better.

About half and half. We'll go scout-specific and go over plays and what we'll see on defense and all of that. But we're still working on us. We'll still do skill work every day.

That takes some time so, that, you'll see that change. That'll change probably up until January and people will be able to earn themselves more minutes and be able to play a little bit longer, so they won't look quite the same. But it's so much easier. I've learned to start at this foundation and add more than it is to start higher and then take away. And so we're just still going to work out those combinations of who could play the longest and win. And again, it's some stuff that takes time.

It's all productivity based on their stat line. So it's something that I care so little about that I will just ask my assistant, like, right before the game, who's starting this game.

No, that's not something we look at.

Definitely needs to be cleaned up, especially as we go throughout the season and we play bigger and bigger opponents. We gotta box out. And that's been, we've talked about the whiteboard, right? That's been our tallies all week. Has been box outs.

It actually makes it easier when we're rebounding, we're already gonna be up in our press, and so you have to run up there anyway to go get the rebound because you have to press, so you might as well go do it.

Same thing. You're already gonna be there. You already be in the spot, something we practice doing all the time.

I thought our shot selection as a group was not great, but I do think it was significantly better in the second half. So it's something we addressed at halftime. And I do think that she got to the benefit of we were sharing the ball a little bit more, and she had some really good assists in the second half, as well. Just because, I think we had that conversation, we settled into ourselves a little bit. We had some nerves. We'll have some nerves tomorrow and just making sure that we just continue to play the way we practice.

I think just first game, they want to force it. They want to get theirs. They want to win the game in the first two minutes. And they don't realize that it's a long game. It's a lot of possessions, more possessions than they're used to. But anytime you've practiced and practiced and practiced, and then you get an arena full of people, right? You kind of turn to a little bit of a different person until you can settle back in.

You can do a lot, especially because she can do it from the outside in, which is what we want.

I think it's a lot of making sure that we take care of the ball, making sure that our half court defense is better if we don't do a better job of going to the 3-point line and going in the half-court, it's not going to be pretty. We've got to take care of the basketball and we have to make it look fast-paced like it did the other night.

Communication issues.

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