In 2017, Joye Lee-McNelis began writing her obituary.

Where she was born. In the southern Mississippi community of Leetown.

Preceded in death by. Then a blank space, not knowing if she would die before her parents.

A note of thanks to her family, to the players she had coached, to the staffs she had worked with and the administrations she had worked for.

McNelis had been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. While thinking about her death, she focused on how her life would be remembered. Her husband, Dennis, thought she was crazy. She reassured him she wasn’t concerned about the act of dying. “I just want to plan it all out,” she told him. “There’s no need having you and our children worrying about it.” She wanted it to feel like a celebration.

McNelis is now 61 and in her 20th season as Southern Mississippi’s head coach. She hasn’t looked back at what she wrote. But one afternoon earlier this fall, McNelis and her father, Louis, sat outside on her patio talking about their prospective funerals. Louis, 87, had Parkinson’s disease and congestive heart failure. Every artery in his heart had been bypassed. McNelis, meanwhile, was in the midst of a third fight with lung cancer. Her second came in late 2020. Having been diagnosed again in August, this time, for the…

HATTIESBURG, Miss. — You’ve got to go back almost two decades to find a stretch of comparable success for University of Tennessee athletics, back to the last SEC East title for Phillip Fulmer and his football Vols (2007), Pat Summitt’s run with Candace Parker (back-to-back NCAA champs in 2007-08), Luke Hochevar and a College World Series advance (2005), Bruce Pearl, yearly softball success from the Weeklys and high approval for then-AD Mike Hamilton.

Karen Weekly and UT softball, fresh off a Women’s College World Series run, have been crushing it all along. Every other listed sport and job endured failure on a scale from “incompetence” to “embarrassment so acute it should never be discussed again,” from the late 2000s to the early 2020s. But now everything is in place, much of it pre-dating AD Danny White but all of it tied together in his two and a half years.

White came in known as a coach finder and revenue driver. He hasn’t done much of the former yet, though Josh Heupel looms large as his football choice and Duane Ross is a promising director of track and field. White is all over the latter in an effort to push UT’s athletic budget from the $150 million range he inherited to the $200 million range of a select few. That’s the neighborhood UT occupied…