It was a challenging week for the Lady Vols and head coach Kim Caldwell, but the Lady Balls did bounce back in a massive way.

Tennessee nearly blew a 23-point lead, but survived Tennessee and LSU coming up tomorrow.

Tennessee basketball full slate ahead here on the weekend.

You are locked on balls, your daily podcast on the Tennessee Volunteers, part of the Locked On Podcast Network, your team every day.

How we doing, everybody? Welcome into it Friday afternoon. This is Locked on Balls, and I'm your host, Eric Kane, a member of the VaultQuest.com team here in town covering your Tennessee volunteers each and every single day. We are a part of the Lockdown Podcast Network, where it is your team every day, number one sports podcasting network available. And every dayers, thanks so much for joining us and being a part of the show. Speaking of an everydayer or I used to be every dayer, maybe as an every other dayer, as you phrased it one time.

Ryan Sylvie, if Rocky Top Insider, we're going to join the show here today, talk a little lady balls and men's basketball. Ryan, thanks so much for being here, man. Let's hit the ground

running here. Let's go back to Sunday. You were in attendance. Tennessee just lost its

worst game in program history, 43 points on the road at number three,

South Carolina. And Kim Caldwell goes out there in that postgame press conference and she lights

a fire under everybody. And, you know, the lasting takeaway from that is she called her team

quitters, essentially. What was your thought process kind of going through those moments and

asking some of those questions

yeah felt like it was going to be a critical junction of the season where hey if you're going to

call out your team i don't have any issue with that but that means they have to respond or else

you know they actually are quitters and obviously they came out and beat missouri pretty pretty

handily but missouri is one of the poor teams in the SEC so we'll see how that translates going forward. But in that moment, it felt like, hey, you're setting up this team right now where they have to have a response. This is the point of the season where you've taken some lumps prior in the year. You've lost pretty bad to Yukon. You've lost pretty bad to UCLA in Louisville. This was the worst one yet. It was the biggest margin of defeat in program history and it wasn't even very close. It was embarrassing. It was the most watched game of women's basketball across the sport so far this season. It was in front of a national audience. You need to have some sort of response because that was, I mean, frankly, an unacceptable performance.

You're not just the Lady Balls basketball program, but you're Tennessee.

Tennessee does not want to be losing by 43 points in any sport or losing by that type of margin

in any sport.

And so it really created a moment where I think we were going to find out a lot about what

this team is actually going to be this year once the NCAA tournament rolls around that week of practice heading into it, what we saw against Missouri. But now also you have to find a way to continue to build on that because you got Texas right around the court. We'll probably learn a little bit more about how much your team actually respond to those comments rather than beating up on a bad Missouri team. Yeah, they respond to the right way on Thursday, and we'll get to that here in a moment. Do you think that the comments were out of frustration? I'm not saying that there's nothing to them, but you're coming off, it was a 43 point loss. She lost by 30 to Yukon, and again, Yukon and South Carolina, two of the best teams of the country.

By the end of the season, I heard the staff the other day. The Lady Balls will have played, you know, the first ranked team, second ranked team, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth the season. Most of those on the road as well. And again, you're trying to climb and get back to where you need to be. do you think it was more out of frustration, how that specific game went?

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