Dan Fleser: Horston Talking National Championship; Post Play Could Be Weak Link For Men's Team

  • Thursday, October 20, 2022
  • Dan Fleser
Dan Fleser
Dan Fleser

Tennessee’s Jordan Horston expressed the desire to win a national championship this week. For a change, the Lady Vols senior guard’s wish was fueled more by present circumstances than the program’s history.

Tennessee is ranked fifth in the first Associated Press top 25 poll of the women’s basketball season. The team was picked to finish second in the conference behind defending national champion South Carolina. Horston and teammates Tamari Key and Rickea Jackson received all-conference honors in conjunction with the SEC’s media day on Tuesday. While Horston and Key are UT veterans, Jackson, an All-SEC honoree at Mississippi State, is one of four transfers.

Collectively, the newcomers have enhanced the team’s height and athleticism. In doing so, they also have helped raise the team’s aspirations.

Championship talk doesn’t necessarily need to be squashed. It merely needs the proper context. Coach Kellie Harper, who played on three national championship-winning teams at Tennessee, laid out a useful framework at the media day in Birmingham, Al.

“If you start thinking about April when it’s October, if we start worrying about April right now, that is pressure,” Harper said. “But if we’re just trying to be the best we can be today and then tomorrow and understand that it’s a process, I think that helps.

“And I’ll tell you what, speaking from experience, you can’t skip steps; you can’t. You just have to enjoy each and every day. You have to enjoy the journey together, the ups and downs because that’s what builds championship teams.”

Vols picked third: UT men’s basketball has been picked to finish third in the SEC. Like the Lady Vols, three Vols – Santiago Vescovi, Josiah-Jordan James and Zakai Zeigler – received all conference recognition in conjunction with the men’s media day.

Like Key and Horston with the Lady Vols, Vescovi and James are the established elders of their team. During his media session in Birmingham, Ala., UT coach Rick Barnes said of the duo: “It seems like they’ve been with us forever, and I would like to keep them forever because of what they do, the way they go about their business. They have a professional mentality in terms of not only what they do with the basketball, but the things they do off the court and their leadership with our team.

“We talked a year ago about needing more leadership. We really felt at the end of the year or really in the middle of the year that those guys started doing that.”

When asked about his biggest question regarding the team, Barnes mentioned the Vols post game.

“Defensively we expect to be a good defensive team,” he said. “We think that we have more depth than we’ve had in a long time, quality depth that we think that we can play and versatility. The question I think anybody would have with us right now is what kind of production that we can get from our post players consistently. So, that’s what we’ll wait and see.

In the season’s first AP poll, the Vols are ranked No. 11.

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Dan Fleser is a 1980 graduate of the University of Missouri, who has covered University of Tennessee athletics since 1988. He is a 2022 inductee to the Tennessee Sportswriters Hall of Fame. He can be reached at danfleser3@gmail.com.

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