Kim Caldwell’s Daring Vision: Reviving Tennessee Women’s Basketball to Its Former Glory

Nestled between national forests deep in the rural wilderness of central West Virginia is the 15 Mile Road. It’s the long, winding path to Glenville, home of Division II Glenville State, with few turnoffs, no traffic lights and spotty cell phone service.

The drive served as the final stretch of a celebratory 600-plus mile bus ride for the first time in the university’s history three years ago. A police escort met the women’s basketball team at the state border, swapping out every so many miles as it guided the women’s basketball team back home.

Flashing lights from awaiting firetrucks lit up the corner as the bus approached the final turn. Fans filled the streets with signs. More fans awaited at the school. Not only were they the first at Glenville to win a title, they were the first basketball team to bring a national championship to West Virginia. The governor hosted them for dinner.

Bringing home a historic national championship began a rapid ascension for head coach Kim Caldwell. The Pioneers reached the Final Four a year later, but failed to repeat in what would be Caldwell’s final of seven years at the helm. In 2023, Marshall University hired her to the Division I ranks, where she led the Thundering Herd back to the NCAA tournament for the second time in program history, and the first since 1997.

That was enough for Tennessee athletic director Danny White, who went outside of the Lady Vols family for the first time since the late Pat Summitt stepped away in 2012 to make Caldwell the program’s fourth head coach in the NCAA era. It was a surprising hire for the person as much as the system.

Caldwell helms a fast-paced, five-in, five-out, pressure defense with “hockey subs” to keep players fresh to play at full octane. She goes 10 deep, swapping out starting lineups by the game and giving players the green light to shoot 3-pointers early in the shot clock. It’s a system few use and many have questioned.

At powerhouse Tennessee, the pedigree is long and the expectations high. The Lady Vols have celebrated eight national champions, trailing only UConn’s 11 in Division I women’s basketball history. Caldwell has already checked off one success by securing an NCAA tournament berth, extending the program’s streak of playing in every one ever played. Tennessee, a 5 seed, then advanced to the Sweet 16, where it will face No. 1 Texas on Saturday.

It’s the first step in a long road toward showing Caldwell’s system will work at the DI level and bring a larger celebration to Rocky Top.

‘It was hell, I’m telling you’

The preseason conditioning in her freshman year at Glenville State was more than Re’Shawna Stone had ever done in her life. Running the track at 6 a.m. Running a one-mile conditioning test in a strict time limit. Running. Running. Running.

“I’m not going to lie, it was really tough,” Stone told Yahoo Sports.

The morning skills sessions were intense. Early on, freshman Zakiyah Winfield and a teammate were kicked out of the gym until afternoon practice for not executing the press correctly.

“It’s challenging at first,” Winfield told Yahoo Sports. “It’s different, especially just coming out of high school and into that system. It’s just really unique.”

Even entering with Division I basketball experience didn’t matter.

“I thought, this is going to be cake, it’s going to be easy,” Mashayla Cecil, a Glenville State guard who transferred from Eastern Kentucky as a sophomore, told Yahoo Sports. “It was hell, I’m telling you.”

The first year requires immediate buy-in and an acceptance of doing things differently. Training can look like a track meet and the minutiae can be tedious. Caldwell is always telling her players, “Hate me now, love me later.” She wants to see more than 85 field goal attempts, 20 turnovers, 15 steals and 20 offensive rebounds per game to win the possession battle, increasing the odds of victory.

It’s the “Moneyball” approach to hoops.

Plenty of teams play with pace, push in transition and press, prioritizing defense to spark offense. Texas’ Vic Schaefer wants point guard Rori Harmon picking up opponents at 94 feet. Ohio State and Michigan State utilize full-court presses. West Virginia is notorious for turning over opponents and causing problems to NCAA tournament foes on short turnarounds.

“That is not that bad to transition to” as a player or coach, Angel Rizor, an assistant on the Glenville, Marshall and Tennessee teams, told Yahoo Sports. “It’s more so the subbing.”

When Rizor, a four-year starter at Cincinnati from 2016-20, initially interviewed with Caldwell, she didn’t know the “magnitude” of the subbing Caldwell requires. Every minute or two, a new five check into the game to keep legs fresh and the relenting pressure at a high bar. The groupings are not always the same.

The Lady Vols had 16 different starting lineups — known as “first five” in Caldwell’s system — over the course of 31 games. The “next five” also vary based on prior performance, stats and, in what is now Rizor’s job, in-game vibes.

“Sometimes we have players that technically probably are leading scores, but if they’re not hitting that game, you can’t just leave them in the game,” Rizor said. “But then we do have groups where certain people will play with certain people they’re more confident with, so we do have groups we try to stick to. But if we can’t … it’s a feel.”

The “hockey subs” put additional pressure on opposing players racking up 30-plus minutes a game, growing tired by the final buzzer with the constant defensive attention. And it alleviates a mental and physical fatigue for their own players, who take 3-pointers early in the shot clock and are pressing, jumping and trapping non-stop defensively, in slightly different ways each game.

“The system itself depends on who we play,” Rizor said. “Even though people think our press is just chaotic, we do have certain ways we want to do it, but it changes based upon who we’re playing. We will change things up a lot. There’s no way we’re going to do a certain thing each time.”

In Glenville State’s championship season, 11 players averaged at least 10 minutes per game. Stone averaged a team-high 22.8 minutes and started all but two of their 36 games, an anomaly. Winfield averaged 21 minutes and started 24 games.

“Her coaching style [makes her special],” Stone said. “Being able to use all her players, and just believing in each one of them, and just trusting that they’re all buying into what she’s coaching. I don’t know too many coaches doing it the way she’s doing it.”

The constant lineup changes was the most difficult change the coaching staff experienced taking the system to the DI level. DII athletes will largely “do whatever is needed to play,” Rizor said, so they can continue their basketball careers for a little longer. At Marshall, she said it was hard for the star players.

“They’re used to playing 30 to 40 minutes a game,” Rizor said. “Typically at [the] DI level, if you’re the best player, you’re staying on that floor. So that was an adjustment to them.”

That’s where the coaching staff is imperative, she said, in explaining the pros of the system and instilling confidence in every player. The benefit is earning rest and breaks, rather than playing 10 minutes straight. And the role players beyond the top five or six are gaining time on the floor they wouldn’t have otherwise.

“For all I knew, regular basketball was, you have your players, your seven, maybe eight, and you rock with those players,” said Cecil, who Caldwell hired as a graduate assistant at Marshall and Tennessee. “It’s real team basketball, you know what I mean? You have to buy into it and keep that good mindset.”

It led to seven years of success, a 191-24 record and a title at Glenville State.

The system delivers a championship

The night the Glenville State Pioneers lost on a buzzer-beater in the second round of the 2021 NCAA DII tournament, Winfield texted her head coach.

“We’re going to win the whole thing next year,” Winfield tapped out ahead of her and Stone’s senior seasons.

It was the conclusion of Caldwell’s fifth season at Glenville State after returning to her alma mater in 2016, five years after graduating. The teams Caldwell (née Stephens) coached are all over record books with historic offensive outputs, including two teams that averaged more than 100 points per game. The Pioneers won four Mountain East Conference regular season championships, three MEC tournament championships and reached the DII NCAA tournament every year she was there.

Players estimated it took a full season to fully grasp and act in the system. Rizor would put it closer to two, though players are never really “settled” into it. By the time Winfield, Stone and Cecil lost that second-round game, they were developing specialists.

“That’s why that team was so great,” said Rizor, a first-year assistant on the championship team. “By their senior year, they were amazing. It’s because they knew that system like the back of their hand. … They knew exactly what to do and when to do it.”

Glenville State went undefeated in the regular season and 22-0 MEC play to win another regular season title. In a 141-55 win over Wheeling in early January, they scored a record 50 points in the second quarter. Stone and Winfield each scored 29 that game.