When Holly Warlick was named Lady Vols basketball coach in 2012, I despaired for her. Not that Warlick wasn’t well qualified for the job. What better preparation than the 27 years she had spent as a player and assistant coach under Pat Summitt, whose 1,099 wins and eight national championships had made her legendary?

But the diagnosis of early onset dementia that had forced Summitt into early retirement made for an awkward transition. And trying to follow in the footsteps of a legend can put a monkey on the back of anyone, under any circumstances.

Consider the travails of the man who followed the legendary John Wooden as UCLA men’s basketball coach when Wooden retired in 1975 after winning his 10th national championship. In his two years at the helm, successor Gene Bartow took the Bruins to the Final Four and then the Sweet Sixteen. But that wasn’t good enough to stop incessant sniping from boosters and the media, which led to Bartow’s resignation in 1977. (Fortunately, he went on to an illustrious career as coach and then athletic director at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.)

Making matters yet more difficult for Warlick, she faced the loss of four senior starters from Summitt’s final team, three of whom went on to play in the WNBA.

So 2013 looked like a rebuilding year.

Yet, in her first season, Warlick not only exceeded expectations but she also bettered Summitt’s record during her final season. The Lady Vols moved up from a 12-4 second place finish in the SEC to a 14-2 conference championship. And they also matched Summitt’s Elite Eight finish in the NCAA tournament, which was as far as any Lady Vol team had gotten since Summitt’s last national championship in 2008.

Warlick also got off to a good start on the recruiting front, aiming to fortify the team for the years ahead. Her prize catch in 2013 was Mercedes Russell, a 6-foot-6-inch post player from Oregon who was rated the top college prospect in the land. Then in 2014 she attracted a transfer from North Carolina, Diamond DeShields, who had just been named the national college freshman of the year. The roster also included another tenacious post player, Bashaara Graves, who’d been named 2013 SEC freshman of the year. And there were a pair of promising perimeter players, Andraya Carter and Jordan Reynolds.

However, Russell was hampered as a freshman by orthopedic problems with both feet, leading to a succession of surgeries that forced her to miss the entire 2014-15 season. And DeShields had to sit out that same season per NCAA transfer rules.

Coming into the 2015-16 season, though, the prospects looked very good for the Lady Vols to make it back to the Final Four, as attested by their number four preseason ranking. But it soon became apparent that their performance wasn’t living up to expectations. At the season’s halfway mark, the team already has as many losses (six) as in the entirety of each of the two preceding seasons, including an ignominious defeat to Arkansas, which had a 6-10 record.

In a televised pregame pep talk at the beginning of the season, Warlick exhorted her players to be “relentless.” Following the Arkansas game, she characterized their performance as “lackadaisical.” The team did manage one all-time record in that game: 24 turnovers, including seven by DeShields. When asked by the media post-game, “How do you get this fixed?” Warlick responded, “I don’t know. We’ve got great kids. They play hard one game and then they don’t.”

What may prove even worse than their downslide on the court is a precipitous decline in recruiting. This year, for the first time in memory, the Lady Vols didn’t sign a single prospect. Adding insult to injury, the number three ranked high school senior in the nation is from Murfreesboro, and she’s going to Connecticut.

I’m sure it’s not for lack of trying that Warlick has repeatedly failed to fill the most conspicuous hole in Tennessee’s roster: namely, another post player to go with Russell. A season ago, the two top-rated high school post players in the South (one from Miami and the other from New Orleans) made a joint recruiting trip to Knoxville but then committed as a tandem to go to Baylor. But all was not lost because a 6-foot-4-inch Nigerian native who had emerged at a Florida junior college was being courted into the summer months. After visiting Knoxville, though, she went on to Lexington where she signed with Kentucky and is a double-digit scorer as well as the team’s leading rebounder. Also, last June, a 6-foot-3-inch former teammate of DeShields at North Carolina announced that she was transferring. Tennessee was on her short list, but Ohio State won out. The two top-ranked players in this year’s high school senior class both happen to be post players from Texas, and both of them made recruiting trips to Knoxville before committing elsewhere.

As much as I hate to say it, the likeable Warlick just doesn’t have the charisma or intensity of Summitt in her prime. And the Lady Vols brand has plainly lost its luster.

As many times as she’s whiffed of late, I’m afraid Warlick may be on the verge of striking out.

Joe Sullivan

Joe Sullivan is the former owner and publisher of Metro Pulse (1992-2003) as well as a longtime columnist covering local politics, education, development, business, and tennis. His new column, Perspectives, covers much of the same terrain.