KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – With under one month before its season opener—and just over two weeks before its much-anticipated preseason exhibition with Duke—the University of Tennessee men’s basketball team hosted Thursday its annual local media day.
Led for the 11th season by head coach Rick Barnes, who in September finalized a lifetime contract to remain at the helm for the Volunteers, Tennessee sports a revamped roster of both experienced returners and tantalizing new talent. Barnes, the active wins leader among all Division I coaches, enters the 2025-26 campaign with 836 career victories. He returns four letter winners for the upcoming slate, as well as welcomes nine new scholarship players, including a Third Team All-Big Ten pick, senior guard Ja’Kobi Gillespie, and the highest-ranked recruit in program history, freshman forward Nate Ament.
Tennessee is coming off a 30-8 (12-6 SEC) campaign in 2024-25. It finished fifth in the national polls for the second season in a row, as well as reached the Elite Eight for the second consecutive year.
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Quotes from Barnes’ Thursday press conference can be found below. To view the press conference online, click HERE. For quotables from select student-athletes, click HERE.
Tennessee Head Coach Rick Barnes
On who has been most consistent..
“I would think day in and day out the most consistent guys would probably be Ja’Kobe Gillespie, certainly, I would put Felix Okpara in that group. For a young guy, I think Nate Arment has done a pretty good job with that too, has a lot has been thrown at him. Everyone has shown that they can do it, it’s just a matter of putting the back-to-back days together, being impressive even in a short time. Being able to pick up the practices. I think he’s shown a real willingness to figure a whole different game for himself. He’s playing right now but we just need one more.”
On one thing that the fans want to know about this team…
I think the biggest thing is that we’ve got so many new guys, and we’re gonna get introduced to those new guys here pretty soon, but the fact is unless you’re here everyday and around players you don’t ever really know, that being around them every day, we’ve got a really good group of guys who are committed to each other. That’s not just me coach speaking. And that’s one thing that’s shown that we weren’t sure about, and you know when you bring in some sort of guys, how they’re gonna blend, and they’ve done a great job of that.
On worrying about the connectivity of the team after losing guys like Jahmai Mashack and Zakai Ziegler…
“You do. You worry. That was a big thing coming in, that’s why we believe the most important thing we can do is retention. When you talk about retention you’re talking about guys that understand the way you do things, the way you want things done on a day-to-day basis, not just in this building but away from here, in everything they do, how we feel represented and I really do appreciate the older guys setting the tone for the younger guys that come in because they don’t know what they don’t know. Most everybody that comes in until they go through the grind of it it’s really hard to explain to anybody. Even though they may see it from a visit or something, they think they can do it but they realize when they get here it’s hard to maintain, and it’s supposed to be. There’s older guys that really do and have done a good job trying to explain to them, help them out, what’s next, what we’re up against.”
On adapting to NIL in his 11th year…
“In all my years of college basketball, we’ve had to adapt every year to something. That just is what it is. There’s been so many different changes throughout my career in basketball, and we do adapt, or it’s not gonna work. But where we are today, I’m thankful again. It goes out to our administration. They’ve done everything from their point of view, in terms of what we have to do to be competitive, and where we are today, and how it has to be done, and I appreciate that. They’ve jumped in on it, they know exactly what we gotta do, and our formula. We’re going to stick with it, and that’s not to say it may not change tomorrow. But we are in the position where we are always ready to adapt to change and pivot different ways based on where we are and what might happen.”
On how he stays true to who he is as a head coach…
“I think transparency, I think when we talk to people about our program here we are very transparent, very honest, we tell them how it’s going to be. Regardless of all the other things that we’re dealing with in college sports today, still the game is the game. The fundamentals are the fundamentals, the way we play, we want to play the style that we want to play too. We also know that sometimes the players might not do exactly what you thought coming in, just adapt to that. When you have experienced staff like I have and time to take in with these guys we’ve quickly learned which way to go.”
