The day before a fan event in Knoxville in mid-October, Volunteers coach Kellie Harper figured out exactly what she was going to wear. Collecting dust on a coat rack inside her office was a relic from her past: the white, No. 14 jersey she sported during her freshman season at Tennessee. She was sure it would bring smiles to the faces of both her players and the school’s rabid supporters.
Senior center Tamari Key said the jersey gave her “all the feels.” Senior guard Jordan Horston, however, questioned its authenticity. “I did not know it was an actual jersey,” she said. Adding about its thick material, “If we wore that today then I would be sweating bullets."
Harper’s jersey from her days as the team’s point guard paid homage to a time when the Vols ruled the sport. Their run from 1996 to ’98 proved to be the lone three-peat in Hall of Fame coach Pat Summitt’s 38-year tenure. Horston says it’s very special to have a coach who “knows the ropes” of the program, who was coached by Summitt and who “knows what the expectations are.”
Ten seasons have passed since Summitt retired from coaching. Even after her death in 2016, her presence is still unavoidable. Across the street from Thompson-Boling Arena is Pat Summitt Plaza, on which an eight-foot, seven-inch bronze statue of the coach was placed in ’13. In the team’s locker room there is a mural listing Summitt’s Definite Dozen, the 12 principles she popularized as a means to create success in basketball, and life. (“It’s Tennessee’s most basic set of rules,” Summitt wrote in her 1998 book In Harper’s office, there are a number of mementos from her playing days in which Summitt is prominently featured. Among her favorites is a picture from one of her final two seasons that shows the legendary coach dishing her trademark icy-blue stare out to the point guard.
Just over two decades after that photograph was taken, Harper now enters her fourth season as the Vols’ coach. The program, with a number of key returners and additions via the transfer portal, is No. 5 in the preseason Associated Presspoll, its highest mark entering a season since 2015–16. It’s possible this year’s team is the university’s most talented since Summitt retired.
Harper, 45, openly discusses their lofty aspirations, but she’s well aware that merely putting on the orange-and-white jersey does not mean a net will be cut down in March. While some draw similarities between her and Summitt, Harper hopes to make her own mark with the Vols—it’s a constant balancing act of holding ties to the past while trying to be forward-looking.
“It’s important that we do two things here,” she says. “We have to honor and celebrate the tradition. We absolutely have to. But we also have to stay current and relevant as well.”
