Harper returned from vacation about the same time her players got to Knoxville in June. It was some well-deserved rest after a long season and a spring that saw her crisscrossing the country and region for recruiting, Big Orange Caravan stops and speaking engagements. She also made sure her players got a break. After exams wrapped in mid-May, the team scattered home, including Jessie Rennie to Australia and Marta Suárez to Spain, and the head coach set a deadline of June 8 – classes started June 9 – to max out the down time.
Finding a week off for a family vacation with her husband, Jon Harper, and their two children, Jackson and Kiley, took some effort.
“We just had to carve out a week and say you know what, there’s not a perfect week on our schedule so let’s just find one and go with it,” Kellie Harper said. “I’ll never forget … I know people have heard me talk about Pat a lot as my coach, but I came over, I was a young coach and I came over and was talking to Pat about coaching and she said, ‘I’m going down to the beach,’ and I said, ‘Oh, that’s wonderful.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, for two weeks,’ and I said, ‘Oh, that sounds even better.’
“And she said, ‘Kellie, you have to do this. You have to make time for yourself because if you’re not your best, you’re not giving your team your best.’ And I remember her telling me you’ve got to take time for yourself. It has been hard. It has been hard to find that, but we definitely carve it out.”
The late Pat Summitt used a color-coded, printed calendar to keep track of everywhere she needed to be from practice to meetings to media to public appearances. Devices now track all of it, and Harper’s phone buzzed throughout March, April and May in a spring in which the Lady Vols reached the Sweet 16 for the first time in six years, and Harper and crew signed a stellar class via the transfer portal.
Harper’s itinerary in the spring included an excursion to Detroit for a home visit with Rickea Jackson shortly before the All-SEC player selected Tennessee; a trip to Wichita, Kansas, for the Sweet 16; additional home visits with transfers and 2023 recruits; a three-day weekend of showcase events across the country; multiple stops on the Big Orange Caravan tour; SEC meetings in Florida; a trip to Colorado as a member of the committee for USA Basketball junior national teams; and finally, a vacation.
“During March, we were doing in-home visits with the 23 class, and any transfers at that point as well,” Harper said. “Typically, April is a little bit lighter, typically, the recruiting that you’re doing is on campus and it’s typically with underclassmen, maybe on a weekend here or there. But with the transfer portal it added to what a normal April is. It was a lot.
“But I felt like we were working really hard and obviously we gained two great players in that month and super excited about those two. But it was just different. It was just a different landscape. It was the first post-pandemic transfer portal, but it was a different environment for all coaches. We just had to kind of figure it out on the fly.”