GREENVILLE, S.C. — With its lowest seed ever for the Southeastern Conference women’s basketball tournament, Tennessee was facing a tall order of five victories in five days to win the league championship.
A day after taking step one of that journey without much trouble by dispatching low seed Texas A&M in the 16-team field at Bon Secours Wellness Arena, the Lady Volunteers hit a roadblock — and might be on the road throughout the NCAA tournament instead of enjoying one last weekend in Knoxville this season.
Vanderbilt freshman sensation Mikayla Blakes scored 24 points for her 19th 20-point game of the season, Iyana Moore added 23 points while making four 3-pointers, Khamil Pierre had a double-double (16 points, 15 rebounds), and the eighth-seeded Commodores beat 18th-ranked, ninth-seeded Tennessee 84-76 on Thursday in the second round of the SEC tournament.
“A very disappointing loss for us,” Tennessee first-year head coach Kim Caldwell said in the Lady Vols’ postgame news conference. “I think we were inconsistent again.Same old story: We played really hard when the ball’s going in the hole, didn’t do a good job on the defensive end, and we just weren’t able to finish it.”
Vanderbilt, which had a first-round bye virtue of its seed, beat Tennessee twice in a single season for the first time in series history. The Commodores won 71-70 in Nashville on Jan. 19, when Blakes made a putback basket with 0.8 second left to stun the Lady Vols.
Vanderbilt (22-9) will play again at noon Friday against fifth-ranked, top-seeded South Carolina (27-3), which received a double bye into the quarterfinals after sharing the SEC regular-season championship with Texas. The Commodores lost the regular-season matchup with the Gamecocks, who have won two of the past three NCAA Division I tournament titles, falling 82-54 on Feb. 23 in Nashville.
“We’re not done yet,” Vanderbilt coach Shea Ralph said in the Commodores’ postgame news conference. “This is just the beginning of March. We expected to win today, and we’re excited to move on to tomorrow.”
Ruby Whitehorn led Tennessee (22-9) with 14 points as Talaysia Cooper, Jewel Spear and Samara Spencer each scored 13 against Vanderbilt. Zee Spearman’s 10 rebounds were a team high, and Cooper added four steals, four rebounds and three assists to her stat line.
At one point, the Lady Vols had been projected as one of the top 16 overall seeds that host on the NCAA’s opening weekend, but they have lost three of their past four games, making early travel more likely, although much depends on what happens in other power conference tournaments this week. The entire 68-team bracket will be revealed on March 16.
It will be two weeks before the Lady Vols take the court again for a game.
“It’s been a really disappointing last week, week and a half,” Caldwell said. “I don’t think we’ve played well, even in some of the games we’ve won. So we need to rest, we need to get healthy, and then we need to get back to it.”
Senior guard Samara Spencer, who played three seasons at Arkansas before transferring to Tennessee last year, hasn’t played in the NCAA tourney since her freshman campaign with the Razorbacks, but she’s confident the Lady Vols — who have never missed the event — can stick around a while because she believes they’re more like the team that beat Texas A&M 77-37 than the one that couldn’t conquer the Commodores.
“I feel like that was what our brand of basketball is,” Spencer said of the win over the Aggies. “We just couldn’t execute it tonight. But there’s still plenty season left to play with the NCAA tournament around the corner, so we just have to focus on that right now.”
Vanderbilt started Thursday’s game on a 17-5 run, and Tennessee answered with a 12-2 surge in the second quarter to take the lead at 32-31.
The Commodores regained a double-digit lead midway through the third quarter — despite starter Khamil Pierre picking up her third foul — during a 13-0 run that Blakes capped with a scoop shot in the lane to make it 56-42. Blakes scored nine points during the run.
Vanderbilt made its first four shots of the fourth quarter, with two apiece from Pierre and Blakes, for a 20-point lead at 71-51. The Commodores struggled down the stretch with seven turnovers and two misses from the field, but they made seven of eight free throws to keep the lead above six points.
The Commodores outrebounded Tennessee 42-34, including 15-10 on the offensive glass, and outscored the Lady Vols 21-6 on second-chance points. Vanderbilt also took 22 free throws and made 16, while the Lady Vols went 3-for-8 at the foul line.
Compiled by Marty Kirkland. Contact him at mkirkland@timesfreepress.com.