KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — In October, before Kim Caldwell had coached a game for Tennessee, she sat on an orange couch in her office and tried to get comfortable.
This was both a physical and philosophical challenge for the first-year Lady Volunteers coach at the time. At five months pregnant with her first child, there were certain realities about what “comfortable” might look like moving forward for her, and she missed the caffeine that she had given up months earlier (especially at this point in the year when team prep could seem never-ending).
But there was a deeper question: How does Caldwell — who had coached just 33 Division I basketball games — get comfortable in a position once held by one of the most important people in women’s basketball? And not just that, but how does she proceed when the program had fallen from its previous heights to a middling territory, which in Lady Vols-speak, is as bad as irrelevance? As someone who had coached against just three power conference opponents, how would she come up with the answers to get this program back to the standard that Pat Summitt set?
Caldwell, 36, grew up when Tennessee and UConn ruled women’s college basketball. Summitt and Geno Auriemma — their intensity and their rivalry — broke through the noise to make…
