Coach Kim Caldwell didn’t expect to be 12-0 when December came to an end.

“Nope,” Caldwell said with a smile after last Sunday’s win over Winthrop. Not at all.”

But the new Lady Vols head coach also knows the road ahead is littered with basketball landmines.

“I think our SEC January schedule is pretty brutal, so I don’t know how often we will be the favorite, because we play a lot of top 10 teams in the next 30-35 days,” Caldwell said. “I’m going to try to keep them humble and make sure that we watch the film, and we learn from this film. This film should humble them pretty quickly.”

The film in this case is the 114-50 win over Winthrop – the head coach is former Lady Vol great Semeka Randall Lay – and Caldwell will show her team the missed boxouts on the boards during practice. The team had the day off Monday – a wise move with tough post-holiday practices and two SEC games this week – and then got back to work.

The much smaller Eagles grabbed 18 offensive rebounds, a total that vexed Caldwell enough to bring it up twice in her post-game press conference. She knows if an SEC team gets that many, Tennessee is likely to walk off the court with a loss.

“We just cannot give up 18 offensive rebounds to anyone,” Caldwell said. “When we play teams that are taller than us, that number is going to be doubled, and it’s going to be horrible. Our players have to take it seriously.”

No. 15 Tennessee opens SEC play on the road Thursday, Jan. 2, at Texas A&M at 8 p.m. with a livestream on SECN+. In lieu of a broadcast crew, the stream will pick up Texas A&M’s radio feed, so Tennessee fans probably will want to mute it and listen to Voice of the Lady Vols Brian Rice on the radio. Tennessee will return home for games against No. 9 Oklahoma on Sunday, Jan. 5, and No. 6 LSU on Thursday, Jan. 9.

The first month of 2025 also includes trips to Arkansas; Vanderbilt, which is one vote away from the top 25; and No. 5 Texas. The Lady Vol will host Mississippi State, which is receiving votes in the top 25, and No. 2 South Carolina before the month ends.

Coach Kim Caldwell, center, smiles as Kaniya Boyd, far left, speaks with Sara Puckett, Ruby Whitehorn, Avery Strickland and Jewel Spear also listening. Boyd, a freshman, scored a career-high 15 points against Winthrop. (Kate Luffman/ Tennessee Athletics)

The last game of 2024 brought Lay back to Knoxville as a head coach. She shared her memories with her players and showed them the place that forged her as a basketball player. For a full story of the game with press conference videos and highlights, click HERE.

“Fans were great,” Lay said. “Environment was awesome. I enjoyed telling them all the stories that I experienced here. I hope that I can create that for them at Winthrop.”

When the visiting team and head coach were announced, cheers erupted from the 11,152 fans, and audible boos could be heard. As a player, Lay was booed at Connecticut – that column can be read HERE – and Tennessee fans adopted the moniker for her as a badge of honor.

The crowd size was the first 10,000-plus crowd since Tennessee played LSU on Feb. 25, 2024. The last time Tennessee had at least 10,000 fans in the stands before January was against Stanford on Dec. 18, 2021. The last time that many showed up for a non-power conference opponent before January was against Stetson on Dec. 30, 2015.

Tennessee fans have enjoyed the start to the season, and attendance, which always spikes in SEC play, has trended upward throughout November and December.

“She has a style, and she’s sticking to what she believes in,” Lay said after being asked about Caldwell’s debut at Tennessee so far. “ When you step in and become a head coach, you’ve got to believe in what you’re doing out there, and she’s convinced her team that this is the formula to be able to win.

“They finished non-conference 12-0. I mean that’s pretty damn good. So, now they’ve got to get ready for conference play. I think for the Lady Vol fans, this is something that obviously they’ve been waiting and wanting, and she’s been able to achieve that in the non-conference play.”

While the Lady Vols are undefeated with wins over Florida State and Iowa, Caldwell intends to keep the underdog role. Tennessee was picked by the media and coaches to finish seventh in the SEC, so the Lady Vols are far from a favorite in the conference.

“We’re not the number one team,” Caldwell said. “So, we’re going to keep a chip on our shoulder. We’re going to continue to thrive as the underdog until we’re not.”

Caldwell didn’t expect to be perfect in November and December. She also knows a defeat can be a teaching tool that gets the attention of a team.

“I do think you can teach more on a loss,” she said. “We have tried really hard to teach treating some of these wins as losses, but when you’re 18 to 22 years old, sometimes it hits more when you lose.”

Lady Vol fans hope that doesn’t happen anytime soon. But time is always a teacher.

Maria M. Cornelius, a senior writer/editor at MoxCar Marketing + Communications since 2013, started her journalism career at the Knoxville News Sentinel and began writing about the Lady Vols in 1998. In 2016, she published her first book, “The Final Season: The Perseverance of Pat Summitt,” through The University of Tennessee Press.