NASHVILLE – Rick Barnes admitted his second season as Tennessee’s basketball coach began with virtually nothing in terms of expectations.
He knows that won’t be the case for his third season with the Volunteers.
In two seasons since taking over the mess he inherited from back-to-back coaching changes, Barnes is 31-35 overall and 14-22 in the Southeastern Conference with no NCAA tournament appearances.But with Tennessee returning the core of players who flashed promise individually and collectively this season, he’s already looking forward to next season.
“I hope there’s a whole lot more expectations starting next year,” Barnes said after Thursday’s SEC tournament loss to Georgia. “We ended the game, I think, today with four freshmen and a sophomore on the court. If you could have been in the locker room, you would see how heartbroken they were that they didn’t win, and the lesson is how quickly this ends.
“We’ll get together again and we’ll go back and evaluate it and everything that we’ve done this year, but we want expectations. We want expectations around our program. That’s what we want, but the fact is so much for this group this year was learning experience, and they created some of those expectations. Like I’ve said before, we didn’t handle them.
“The last three halves that we played, we played like a team that knew what it takes to play at this level.”
With eight newcomers, Tennessee was an unknown coming into the season and thus picked 13th in the SEC preseason poll, yet until a late-season collapse the Vols performed above the lowly projection as multiple freshmen outperformed their modest recruiting ratings.
Grant Williams earned SEC All-Freshman team honors after leading Tennessee in scoring in SEC games and rebounding and blocks overall. Jordan Bowden led the Vols in steals and hit 35 3s, second-most behind redshirt freshman Lamonte Turner. Jordan Bone’s obvious talent made his inconsistency more maddening.
John Fulkerson was making an impact before suffering a season-ending injury in December, and Tennessee’s coaching staff likes the short- and long-term potential of redshirting wing Jalen Johnson.
Tennessee’s three sophomores also showed signs of development.
Admiral Schofield overcame an early-season suspension to become one of Tennessee’s most important players by season’s end. Shembari Phillips played well at point guard during Bone’s early-season absence and navigated his own rough patch to play better by late February. Kyle Alexander started 23 games once Fulkerson went down.
Freshmen and sophomores accounted for nearly 70 percent of Tennessee’s points and 66 percent of its rebounds.
“I feel like we have the right pieces,” Williams said. “We’ve just got to develop, work on our games and play hard. All of it will take care of itself once we do that.”
Perhaps more importantly, Tennessee’s young team learned lesson after lesson about competing with college basketball’s best, what it takes to win tight games and how to manage the grind of a season.
The Vols were competitive against the likes of Wisconsin, North Carolina, Oregon and Gonzaga, and they upset Kentucky. They routed Kansas State and Georgia Tech and notched wins at East Tennessee State, Texas A&M, Vanderbilt and Auburn.
Yet Tennessee also coughed up double-digit leads in six losses and flopped down the stretch with seven defeats in its final 10 games. The Vols simply didn’t handle the higher stakes created by a four-game winning streak to end January and also ran squarely into a mental and physical wall.
“I really don’t think it was the rankings or being on the bubble or being in the (NCAA) tournament, all that stuff,” Schofield said. “I really think it was how hard we practice and how hard we work here. We’ve been here since the summertime (with) no breaks. We’ve all been working hard, and we’re a young team.
“You’ve got a lot of guys coming out of high school that don’t do that. They have summers off. They’re out going different places, having fun on vacation. Us, we’ve been working, and with a team like that, your body wears on you throughout a season like this, especially when you’re practicing hard and working hard.
“I think that’s the biggest thing we didn’t handle correctly, and mentally and physically just being ready to play every night.”
When the Vols look back on this season, they ought to find motivation from the close calls and the disappointing finish.
“It’s definitely going to be motivation for next year,” Bone said. “We had no expectations coming into this season, but we wanted to do something big. Next year we’re going to have that chip on our shoulder, and it’s going to be a better year.”
Tennessee won’t have a senior on the roster next season. Fulkerson will return, and the Vols will add Johnson and three freshmen into the mix. One of those newcomers will be Yves Pons, an explosive 6-foot-6 swingman from France.
“I’m excited and I’m looking forward to getting started right now,” Barnes said, “because I know we’re going to add more pieces to our program. We’re going to have a different look, but we know that we’ve got it going in the right direction.”
Contact Patrick Brown at pbrown@timesfreepress.com.