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Lady Vols load up 2021-22 basketball schedule - 247Sports

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Rae Burrell Kellie Harper
Coach Kellie Harper talks to Rae Burrell during the NCAA tourney. (Photo: UT Athletics)

Lady Vols basketball released its schedule this week – and it’s a loaded one.

“One of our staff’s objectives was to continue finding ways to improve our strength of schedule, and I believe we've done that,” Head Coach Kellie Harper said. “We have a challenging and exciting slate of games, and our players will have an opportunity to compete against several experienced and talented lineups. Our desire is that with this schedule, we can develop into the best team we can possibly be.”

Rae Burrell’s “home” game – the senior is from Las Vegas – will actually be two games against Kansas on Friday, Nov. 26, and Oklahoma State on Saturday, Nov. 27, in the South Point Thanksgiving Shootout at South Point Arena. That holiday tournament in Las Vegas is preceded by Tennessee hosting Texas on Sunday, Nov. 21, so the Lady Vols will have three Big 12 opponents in a row. Defending national champion Stanford will be in Knoxville on Saturday, Dec. 18.

The SEC season starts Thursday, Dec. 30, against Alabama in Knoxville, followed by a road a game at Arkansas on Sunday, Jan. 2. The Lady Vols will step out of conference to play at UConn on Sunday, Feb. 6, and the Huskies will make the return trip during the 2022-23 season.

Tennessee, of course, will play South Carolina in the SEC with the game set for Sunday, Feb. 20, so that means the Lady Vols will play three of the Final Four teams from 2021. The regular season wraps up by hosting LSU in Knoxville on Sunday, Feb. 27, with Kim Mulkey, the former head coach at Baylor, visiting Knoxville at the helm of the Lady Tigers.

The SEC tourney will be held March 2-6, 2022, in Nashville at Bridgestone Arena. In an article with this site last April, the head coach hoped the pandemic would be in the rear view mirror in 2022, so that fans could fill the seats at the SEC tourney, which, of course, had limited attendance in 2021. Harper also has quite a few supporters in her hometown of Sparta, which is just 75 miles from Nashville, so that group would have an easy drive.

“For me personally, I’ve got a lot of family that will be able to make the tournament now,” Harper said HERE. “So logistically for the University of Tennessee it’s really exciting.”

Kellie Harper
Coach Kellie Harper (Photo: Randy Sartin, USA TODAY Sports)

It could be a while before the women return to Nashville, if ever. The women’s tourney for 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026 is marked on the SEC website as TBD, or to be determined. The men’s SEC tournament will be held in Tampa, Florida, in 2022 and then goes to Nashville through 2035. The women had been set to return to Nashville in 2026, but that year now goes to the men’s tourney.

Because production of the event takes a full week, including setup and teardown, Bridgestone Arena doesn’t host the men and women in the same year because it locks up the venue for two consecutive weeks and creates conflicts with other events, including the Predators of the NHL.

So where will the women’s SEC tourney be held after 2022? A likely location is Greenville, South Carolina, which has embraced the event. With SEC expansion on the horizon and the addition of Texas and Oklahoma, a western destination could be in the mix later, and Little Rock, Arkansas, has hosted in the past. Chattanooga had been a popular site for years, but the arena falls well short of needed capacity on the lower level and doesn’t have suites. Duluth, Georgia, had bid in the past for the event – fans loved the free parking – but there’s very little to do close to the stadium, and the city apparently backed off bidding for it.

For Tennessee fans wanting to see the women’s SEC tourney in Nashville, get there in 2022.

The lone exhibition game will be against Georgia College on Wednesday, Nov. 3, in Knoxville. Georgia College is coached by Harper’s brother, Ross Jolly. A school also can schedule a scrimmage against a Power 5 team – both Holly Warlick and then Harper took advantage of it, although the pandemic wiped out that option a year ago – but the game can’t be publicized or broadcast. Fans and media can’t attend. Only team personnel, officials and support staff (such as scorekeeper, clock) can be present, and no box scores are released.

One more non-conference game will be added – the schedule got hung up waiting on that to be formalized, so Tennessee moved forward without it – and that opponent will be announced later in a game likely to be held in early or mid-December.

The full schedule is available HERE. Tip times and TV games – the SEC determines TV contracts for conference games – will be added later. The full slate of SEC games for all conference teams is available HERE.

One change from last season – when COVID-19 breakouts wreaked havoc with the schedule – is that games will not be postponed and rescheduled. The SEC announced during the summer that if a team in all sports in the 2021-22 could not take the court (or field, pool, track, course, et al) for a conference game due to COVID-19 issues, the game would be a forfeit, a loss in the standings and a win for the intended opponent.

The change doesn’t affect non-conference games, as schools could continue to adjust the schedule on their own if needed. It just means the SEC won’t play schedule musical chairs for two months in January and February for basketball. If a team has a COVID outbreak and can’t put enough players on the court for an SEC game, it’s a loss.

Teams will have to enforce safety protocols, limit the loss of personnel due to contact tracing – and hope for the best. The Lady Vols got tripped up by COVID-19 twice last season within the team – and also at Texas when the Longhorns had to cancel the game a few hours before tipoff – with the first SEC one coming after Christmas break.

Here’s to a healthy season for all in more ways than one.

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