NEW YORK – Talaysia Cooper stayed low in her stance, waiting for Lucy Olsen to make her move on the last play of the third quarter.
Cooper had just put Lady Vols basketball up by three. She wasn’t letting Iowa even the score. Cooper kept Olsen in front of her and out of the paint, forcing Iowa’s leading scorer into a contested jumper.
Olsen missed the shot. Tennessee carried the lead into the fourth quarter of a game where every possession mattered.
The Lady Vols (7-0) leaned on their defense to secure their first ranked win of the season, beating No. 20 Iowa 78-68 at Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Saturday. It was the first ranked win for new coach Kim Caldwell at Tennessee.
“It wasn’t pretty, wasn’t our best game,” Caldwell said. “But I think you can turn that into a positive, that we can get a lot better, and we have a high ceiling.”
It was a gritty win for the Lady Vols in the Women’s Champions Classic on their biggest stage yet this season. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but they found a way to win with their defense when not everything went to plan – like getting outrebounded 48-33.
But at this point in the season, these games are lessons to Caldwell. And it will be corrected.
“You want to be able to handle them now, so that you can fix them now,” Caldwell said. “So by the time that you get into SEC play, you fixed all these problems. And so games like these are huge for us.”
Tennessee forced 30 turnovers – 18 were steals – and scored 42 points off them. It closed out the win with a 14-1 run over the last four minutes when Iowa (8-1) didn’t hit a single shot.
A lot of the turnovers were produced by the full-court press. But there were several in the half court, where Tennessee’s defense has been weakest to start the season.
But the high-pressure defense got to Iowa in crunch time. The Lady Vols forced the Hawkeyes into three straight turnovers in the half court – it flipped the game from a one-point lead for Iowa with 3:04 left to an eight-point lead for Tennessee with 1:23 left in the game.
It helped that Talaysia Cooper was scoring at will between the Iowa turnovers. The redshirt sophomore guard had eight points in the final four minutes and finished with a team-high 23 points.
“I think we just finally turned it on,” Caldwell said of the final minutes. “They looked like a different team for the last two and a half minutes.”
Caldwell said she felt like the half court defense did take a step, even though there were “some obvious lapses” that allowed Iowa to go on runs that need to be cleaned up.
“But I do think we were flying around, I think we were scrappy,” Caldwell said. “I think we had active hands, which is everything we talked about, and that’s what we wanted.”
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Caldwell isn’t surprised the Lady Vols have adapted to her style of play this quickly. The trust is now there.
Cooper sees it coming together, too. The pressure and pace wore on the Hawkeyes to close out the win.
“I’m not shocked,” Cooper said. “That might sound cocky. But it’s only going to get better from here. Like coach said, keep working hard, just trusting the process, it’s going to get better.”
Cora Hall covers University of Tennessee women’s athletics. Email her at cora.hall@knoxnews.com and follow her on Twitter @corahalll. If you enjoy Cora’s coverage, consider a digital subscription that allows you to access all of it.
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Why Kim Caldwell believes Lady Vols have ‘a high ceiling’ even at
