Kim Caldwell will coach her Lady Vols vs South Carolina week after giving birth

Kim Caldwell will be back on the sideline Monday night when her 17th-ranked Tennessee Lady Vols host the defending national champion South Carolina Gamecocks.

Exactly one week after giving birth to her first child — a bouncing baby boy.

“It's nice to be back,” Caldwell told reporters Sunday.

Caldwell gave birth to Conor Scott on Monday while dealing with the flu. She missed exactly one game, an 80-76 loss at No. 7 Texas on Thursday night with assistant Jenna Burdette filled in as acting coach for that road game.

“It just was more of a helpless feeling than anything else,” Caldwell said of having to watch the one game she missed even with adding Burdette did a great job in her absence.

Caldwell was at practice Friday and has been busy filling up on fluids along with some of the Lady Vols with flu going around the locker room. That's one reason why her son will stay away from the team that held a baby shower for their coach no matter how eager the Lady Vols are to see the newest addition.

"We have a lot of germs,” Caldwell said.

Asked for the baby's height and weight stats, Caldwell said her son came out about the size of her late father and thankfully little.

"He can grow on the outside,” Caldwell said.

The four losses by the Lady Vols (15-4, 3-4 Southeastern Conference) have been by a combined eight points with three of those opponents ranked inside the Top 10. On Monday night, they get another chance with No. 2 South Carolina (19-1, 6-1) coming to Knoxville.

The first-year head coach couldn't watch this game from home, not with the Lady Vols trying to avoid their first three-game skid of the season.

Caldwell has a good support system in place starting with her husband, who won the drawing to name their baby. Her mother also is in Knoxville to help with her sister coming soon.

“It would be a completely different story if that wasn't the case,” Caldwell said.

Caldwell is working to get her Lady Vols to quit committing the same fouls over and over, even as she and her assistants keep going over those points.

Tennessee ranks first in the country averaging 93.4 points a game, and nobody has made more 3s than the Lady Vols who average 11 1/2 per game. They've hit 10 or more 13 times already this season, more than doubling the previous school mark of six. They made 9 of 17 against Texas.

Now comes the challenge of balancing the job of coaching and being a mother.

Caldwell said she visited with Rick Barnes, her husband's boss and the men's coach, during her pregnancy to chat. Barnes who has two children and five grandchildren recalled the birth of his daughter Friday. His advice to balancing coaching and parenthood easily can apply to both Caldwells.

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FILE - Tennessee head coach Kim Caldwell speaks during NCAA women's college basketball Southeastern Conference Media Day, Oct. 16, 2024, in Birmingham, Ala. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart, File)

FILE - Tennessee head coach Kim Caldwell yells from the bench during the second half of an NCAA college basketball game against Iowa, Dec. 7, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/John Munson, File)

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) — The interim government of Ethiopia’s Tigray region appealed for the Ethiopian federal government to intervene after a faction of the Tigray People's Liberation Front seized control of two major towns, leaving several people wounded and raising fears of a return to civil war.

On Tuesday the TPLF faction seized Adigrat, the second-biggest town in Tigray, and appointed a new administrator, ousting the office-holder loyal to the interim government. On Wednesday night, it took control of Adi-Gudem, a town near the regional capital, Mekele. Several people in Adi-Gudem were injured when forces attempted to occupy a government building.

The TPLF fought a brutal two-year war against federal forces which ended in November 2022 with the signing of a peace agreement and the formation of a TPLF-led interim government. Hundreds of thousands of people are believed to have been killed in the fighting which began in November 2020, with millions displaced and many left near famine in Africa’s second-most populous country.

However, since the war ended, the TPLF has splintered. In October, its leader, Debretsion Gebremichael, expelled the head of the interim government, Getachew Reda, from the party along with four members of his cabinet.

In retaliation, Reda, who was the chief negotiator of the peace agreement, temporarily suspended four senior military commanders who he believed were aligned with Gebremichael’s faction.

“The region may be on the brink of another crisis,” read a statement Wednesday from the Tigray Communication Affairs Bureau, which is part of the interim government.

Reda has described the TPLF's recent actions as a “potential coup attempt."

In a televised interview, he emphasized the need for the international community — one of the key guarantors of the Pretoria Peace Agreement — to closely monitor the escalating situation in the war-torn region.

“The parties to the Pretoria Agreement should really take into account the deteriorating situation in Tigray and the far-reaching ramifications of the unraveling of the Pretoria agreements,” he said.

TPLF deputy chairman Amanuel Assefa told The Associated Press that the current crises have nothing to do with the Pretoria agreement but are largely related to law enforcement.

“The TPLF and the Tigray forces are the rightful owners of the Pretoria Agreement. Therefore there is no reason to engage in any actions that would violate that”, he said.

FILE - Ethiopians holding national flags protest against what they say is interference by outsiders in the country's internal affairs and against the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), the party of Tigray's fugitive leaders, at a rally organized by the city administration in the capital Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Saturday, Oct. 22, 2022. (AP Photo, File)