What advice Dawn Staley would give Lady Vols basketball coach Kim Caldwell

COLUMBIA, SC – Dawn Staley knows how it feels to be a younger coach trying to bring an SEC program to prominence.

The South Carolina coach was 38 when she took over the Gamecocks program, only a few years older than Lady Vols basketball coach Kim Caldwell was when she was hired in April 2024.

Staley was asked what advice she would have for Caldwell after No. 3 South Carolina won 93-50 against No. 17 Tennessee at Colonial Life Arena on Feb. 8.

Staley met with the media after Caldwell said she had a team "that’ll just quit on you," and she was also asked if she ever had teams in the past who quit on her.

"I would say very rarely,” Staley said. “I mean, you can see for us, like, there won’t be quit. There might be some undisciplined play out there. There might be some just, we don’t have it, and we’re just on a gerbil wheel, working hard, but going nowhere, right? You can see some of that, and that’s correctable.

"For a young coach like Kim, coaching for the traditional powerhouse of Tennessee, for me, I probably wouldn’t say it publicly. That’s one. Two, you just got to get your team to buy in. And sometimes it’s tricking them. Because it’s a game. It’s a game that you really have to balance and play with the players. Because they know they played like ish, right? They know they did. Sometimes you need to bring, ‘What good happened?’"

Staley went on to explain that showing players some good in it might relax them, because competitors know when they don't play well.

"Competitors know when they need to change their mindsets," Staley said. "And you need the majority of your team thinking the same way. And it has to be positive. If it’s negative, you’re going to get negative results. So I would start from there."

The 43-point loss set a record for the largest margin of defeat in program history, beating the previous record of 31 points in a loss at Texas on Dec. 11, 1984.

Tennessee is only a week removed from suffering what was second-largest margin of defeat in program history with its 30-point loss at UConn on Feb. 1. That loss, a 96-66 defeat, now ranks third.

Cora Hall is the University of Tennessee women's athletics reporter for Knox News. Email: [email protected]; X: @corahalll; Bluesky: @corahall.bsky.social. Support strong local journalism and unlock premium perks: subscribe.knoxnews.com/offers

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Lady Vols coach Kim Caldwell advice from South Carolina's Dawn Staley