In the span of a week, University of Tennessee women’s basketball coach Kim Caldwell will have given birth to her first child and coached a game against the defending NCAA champions.
Caldwell, 36, said at a news conference that she would be back coaching the Lady Volunteers in a big SEC showdown with South Carolina on Jan. 27 — one week after she gave birth to her son.
Caldwell missed the team’s 80-76 loss to seventh-ranked Texas on Jan. 23 following the birth of her son, Conor Scott.
“It was not great,” she said about watching the game from home. “It was uncomfortable, but you get to see it from a different perspective. I was proud of our team, but it was not my favorite thing I’ve ever done as a coach, is have to stay home and watch it on TV.”
“It does give you a little bit of a different view, but not really because you always kind of go back and watch the broadcast anyway,” she added. “So you’ll watch it clipped up and then you’ll watch it kind of in livestream, so it just was more of a helpless feeling than anything else.”
Now she returns to lead the team against South Carolina, a perennial power that won last season’s national championship. The first-place Gamecocks (19-1) are ranked No. 2 in the country, while the Lady Vols (15-4) are ranked No. 17.
Caldwell, who is in her first season as Tennessee’s head coach, said she was already back at practice on Jan. 24, four days after giving birth to a 6-pound, 10-ounce baby boy.
“It was good,” she said. “It’s hard to leave your little one, but then you missed your team and you kind of feel like you were just not there for them, and so to be back and to be around them and to be back in your routine was good.”
Caldwell added that she was also dealing with the flu when she gave birth. The illness had been circulating among the team, so Caldwell said her players are going to “have to wait” to meet her baby son.
“We have a lot of germs,” she said to laughter by reporters.
She shared that her son’s first name was picked out by her husband, while his middle name, Scott, is in honor of her late father.
“We say anyone in the family that has Scott as a middle name is a little bit ornery, just like my dad was,” she said.
Caldwell’s mother is helping her husband with the baby while Caldwell juggles her coaching responsibilities. She said her sister is also coming to help.