Lady Vols head coach Kim Caldwell isn’t shying away from being transparent about the mistakes she made last season.

Tennessee kept its historic NCAA Tournament streak alive last season, but that was pretty much the only highlight for the Lady Vols.

Caldwell went 16-14 in her second year on Rocky Top. The season concluded with an eight-game losing streak.

At one point, things got so bad that Caldwell, in a moment of frustration, called her team out publicly for quitting.

A season that started out with promise because of a strong roster ended with disappointment because of the construction of the roster.

Kim Caldwell makes honest admission about the mistake she made with the Lady Vols’ roster

Caldwell spoke to reporters at the Big Orange Caravan stop in Nashville on Wednesday.

She admitted that she chased “rankings” while building her roster, instead of trying to build a well-rounded roster with the necessary role players.

The result was a roster that didn’t gel and eventually fell apart once real adversity hit.

“I think when you put yourself in a situation where I chased rankings, I recruited all of the same type of player,” said Caldwell. “And they were great players, but they all wanted to do the same thing. We really needed to construct this roster in a way where you had players that could play different roles.”

Caldwell made that mistake, she said, because she was trying to make too many changes too quickly.

“I tried to swing too hard too fast,” said Caldwell. “We went to the Sweet 16 and I tried to change too much. And I openly publicly said we’re going to get seven points better. That’s what I said this whole entire caravan last year, and I didn’t need to try to make those huge changes. We just needed to make a couple of little ones.

“I’m very thankful that we saw success year one, so that we can really look at this last year as maybe an outlier year of my career, and try to make small changes to go back to who we want to be.”

One change that Caldwell is making, or getting back to, is recruiting players with “heart”.

“The biggest thing is we wanted to recruit heart and people that wanted to work hard and people that knew what was at stake,” explained Caldwell. “We really tried to hammer that home in our visits of how hard it was going to be and see if they were up to the challenge, and they all were.”

There’s no denying that mistakes were made last season, but Caldwell learned from those mistakes. And she’s been able to build some serious momentum for the program this offseason, which is remarkable considering how bleak things looked a month ago.