KNOXVILLE - The adage "If you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best" could apply to the Tennessee women's basketball team this season.
Last week the Lady Volunteers ran the gauntlet emotionally, going on the road to defeat then 16th-ranked Notre Dame before coming home and claiming what could best be described as a lackluster win over Tennessee State. Tennessee won that game by 30, but coming off the win over the Lady Irish, the lopsided victory came after a slow start.
Yet the end result was a 4-0 record for the Lady Vols and a return to the Top 25, with a No. 23 set to appear next to the team's name when it faces Stetson (2-2) at 7 Tuesday night at Thompson-Boling Arena.
New coach Kellie Harper wasn't sure exactly what to expect going into that Notre Dame game from a team that, while featuring five upperclassmen and six returning players, had just lost sophomore guard Zaay Green to a torn ACL suffered in a practice two days prior.
What she got were dominant performances from junior Rennia Davis, who totaled 33 points and 10 rebounds, and sophomore guard Jazmine Massengill, who had 13 rebounds and nine assists in the road win.
"I didn't know with that atmosphere, that environment, that quality of team, how we were going to respond," Harper said Monday. "That was a really good positive for us. I didn't think we came out of it great. I thought we weren't as sharp in our next game, so hopefully we can use that as a learning experience and we can do better. But in terms of where we are, I think we are where I expected this team to be at this point."
The players knew it, too. Perhaps there had been too much reveling in the big road win and the team wasn't quite prepared, and that resulted in the slow start against the Tigers.
"Coming off a big win, it was a fun for us, but ultimately, at the end of the day, we just want to continuously keep getting better," sixth-year senior forward Lou Brown said after the TSU win. "We had a good win against Notre Dame, and we had a good win tonight, and tomorrow we're just going to get back at it and keep moving forward and keep finding ways for this team to get better consistently."
With it being her first year at the helm of the program she once played for, Harper has spent a lot of time attempting to build her own culture. It started with a 70-44 exhibition victory over Carson-Newman on Oct. 29 that perhaps could have been a lot worse (Tennessee had won the previous five meetings by an average of 45.6 points), but Harper wanted to focus on her team doing things the right way.
The team has struggled to not turn the ball over, but with a lot of new players being thrust into new roles and one fewer ball handler with the loss of Green, some of that is to be expected, as the Lady Vols have averaged 23.5 turnovers in their last two games. As players get comfortable in new roles, the belief - or hope - is that will change. It'll have to.
Harper's vision is set on doing things the right way. Eventually that'll pay off - and if things aren't always as aesthetically pleasing in the early going, so be it.
"We want to be good because we out-executed our opponent," she said. "We want to be good because we were better than them, not because we're bigger, faster, stronger. We want to do things the right way. That's where we can build more consistency as a team.
"I think it's important that our players are always pushing and always looking for ways to improve. We're going to do that as a staff, and we talk openly about it. We talk openly about who we're playing and what we can do well against them and how that carries over from practice to games and then game to game."
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @genehenley3 or at Facebook.com/VolsUpdate.