Days after a devastating defeat, the University of Tennessee women’s basketball team used a simple strategy to get back on track Sunday in Knoxville, where the opponent was the Eastern Kentucky Colonels: Don’t let them lead.
Sara Puckett made a layup on a Jasmine Powell assist just seven seconds into the game, and the Lady Volunteers never trailed on their way to a 72-63 victory. It’s the first time this season Tennessee (5-5) has won in that fashion.
The game was tied once after that — at 2 and only briefly, with Karoline Striplin putting the Lady Vols right back on top with a free throw for the first of her team-high 17 points. Striplin also had eight rebounds, three assists and three steals for Tennessee, which rebounded from a three-game skid that included Wednesday’s 73-62 loss to Middle Tennessee State University, which beat the Lady Vols for the first time in 23 tries.
Tennessee began the season 11th in The Associated Press poll, but a lack of success against a challenging schedule — the Lady Vols’ first eight games included five ranked opponents, and they went 1-4 in those — kept dropping the ranking, and the stumble versus MTSU to fall below .500 completed the tumble out. Sunday’s win might not do anything about that, but it helped the Lady Vols avoid losing four games in a row, something the program hasn’t done since dropping five straight in February 2020.
“We for sure needed this win” Striplin said in postgame quotes provided by Tennessee. “Nobody likes to lose, and nobody likes to lose multiple times. Being able to pick up this win and do it in a way that we know we can, beating the team on the boards, getting stops we needed and starting off strong in the first and second half is a good thing that we can really build on and look at over the next week.”