Coming off a 49-12 season that ended in the NCAA Women’s College World Series semifinals, Tennessee Lady Vols softball head coach Karen Weekly has been nonstop in preparing for the 2027 campaign.
On Monday, Weekly and I sat down for a conversation on the program, including departures, her coaching staff, the elusive national title and more.
Evaluating everything after the offense stalled
The Lady Vols boasted the nation’s top pitching staff at a 1.47 ERA, but even that wasn’t enough to get them over the hump. Offensively, the team went in the wrong direction from the prior season. That caused Weekly to evaluate things quickly, and with that came the departure of hitting coaches Craig Snider and Stephanie Sanders.
“I think at the end of the year, you sit down as the head coach, and you have to evaluate everything in your program,” Weekly said. “I mean, everything. And it starts with you, and then you go through everyone that works with your program, players, and you have to make some decisions. And that was a difficult decision to make, but one that I just felt was necessary because we just hadn’t really turned the corner offensively.”
Weekly takes no pride in having the power to let people go, whether it’s a player or coach. But to be the best, those hard decisions must be made.
“They’re always hard because there are people involved, and when you work with people for two years, you care about people, and you know they care about this program,” Weekly said. “But it was just a decision that I felt was necessary for us to achieve what I thought we could achieve.”
What caused the offensive backtrack between the 2025 and 2026 seasons is a mystery. The team had a ton of returning talent and came off one of the program’s best offensive seasons in years. It kept coming back to offensive consistency, something Tennessee’s identity lacked.
“We kind of have some highs and some lows, and you’re always kind of looking for, okay, what are those things that no matter what the outcomes are, the process is tried and true, and we’re sticking to it, and you know that it’s eventually going to pay dividends,” Weekly said. “But to me it’s like you look back over a two-year period, and you ask yourself as a head coach, ‘Are we trending in a positive direction?’ Or, ‘Do I think we’re making a move in the right direction?’ And I just didn’t feel like we had done that.”
Going big with the Earleywine hire
Weekly went out and got one of the best offensive minds in softball with Ehren Earleywine. Everywhere Coach E has been, he’s made a huge difference at the plate. Knoxville has reason to be excited, and time will tell if he has the same effect on Lady Vol hitters.
“I believe you go big or go home,” Weekly said on hiring Earleywine. “We want to be the best, and if I see an area of our program that I think we need to improve in, we’re gonna do what we need to do, and we’re gonna go for the very best.”
When Weekly went to Tennessee athletics director Danny White, he gave the full go to get who she needed to bring a championship to Knoxville. That speaks to the high standard this athletics department holds.
“I think Tennessee speaks for itself, just as an institution, as an athletic department,” Weekly said. “Danny White, when I said, ‘This is who I’m going after, and I need you to do whatever we need to do to get him,’ Danny said, ‘Absolutely.’ He said, ‘You tell me what you need because I want to go win a championship.'”
The relationship Earleywine has with the Weeklys goes back to the 1990s, when Ralph Weekly was the director of USA Softball. Earleywine was a great player then, and as a coach he knows how to connect with players and help them with their craft.
“I think that’s why Ehren’s been so successful, is Ehren’s going to meet that person where they are,” Weekly said. “It’s definitely a one-on-one process. First thing he’s gonna ask a hitter is, ‘Tell me about your swing. Tell me how you hit. Tell me what your cues are. Let’s talk about it. Tell me when you were really going good. Okay, is there something that’s happened that’s taking you away from there? How do we get you back to that?’
“So it’s a very collaborative process, and he’s just really, really, really good, not just at hitting, but at every phase of the game. And I always wanna surround myself with people who are smarter than me, and Ehren Earleywine’s one of them.”
A dominant pitching staff and a magic number
With Karlyn Pickens, Sage Mardjetko and Erin Nuwer leading the way in 2026, the Lady Vols pitching staff worked through a season where they were often tasked with shouldering the load. According to Weekly, they did a phenomenal job without feeling the pressure of that responsibility.
That is something she attributed to pitching coach and now associate head coach Megan Rhodes Smith, who sets the goal year after year of being the best staff in America.
The consistency of her pitching staff has allowed Tennessee to have a magic number of three runs since the beginning of the 2023 season. The Lady Vols are 174-11 in that time frame when scoring at least three. It shows Tennessee’s pitching rarely gives up much, so even a low-scoring day can be enough to win.
“That’s a lot of wins where your pitchers are pitching in close games, and I think that’s what’s so remarkable about our pitchers is they get very conditioned to pitching in games that are going to be low scoring,” Weekly said. “On the flip side of that, to think that all we need is three runs or more and we have that significant of a chance of winning, that winning percentage is, I don’t know, 95% or something crazy. It’s huge, huge.”
The title that keeps slipping away
For all that pitching has done, the one prize that keeps slipping away is a national championship. Weekly has made 10 trips to Oklahoma City across her career, and a title still hasn’t formed. She has made a point of not carrying that weight into the dugout.
“I think if you personalize that too much as a coach, it’s gonna wear you down,” Weekly said. “So I honestly never think about that. When we are at the World Series, I’m not thinking about, ‘Oh my gosh, if we don’t win, this will be the 10th time,’ because to me it’s all about the players. They get four opportunities to do this. I’ve had a lot of opportunities, but they only get four, and it’s really about what do they need in this moment, and how can we pour into them to put them in the best position possible to succeed.”
Getting there at all is its own gauntlet. It takes the right recipe to make it to the end. Also, the toughest losses aren’t always the ones on the biggest stage in OKC.
“It is really tough to get there, because probably some of my most bitter losses were the ones in regionals or super regionals,” Weekly said. “It’s really hard to get there, and then everything has to fall into place for you. You have to have great performances. You have to have a little bit of luck. You have to have all the pieces, or if you don’t have all the pieces, you have to have a certain part of your game that maybe plays above where they’ve been playing all year.”
Keeping a roster in the portal era
While Weekly works to carve out a path back, the roster in front of her looks somewhat different than it did a few weeks ago. Tennessee returns a large core, but graduation took Karlyn Pickens and the transfer portal pulled away a few others. Some of those exits, she said, came down to nothing more than opportunity.
“I think first of all, for people who aren’t getting playing time, that’s a no-brainer,” Weekly said. “And as a coach, I sit down with them and say, ‘Hey, you’re not playing. You probably want to play. And if you wanna play every day, I wanna help you find a place where you can go play every day, and make sure that when you transfer, you’re going into a situation where you’re going to get what you want, and not get into a numbers game where you may not play again.'”
The ones that don’t add up so neatly are where Weekly’s frustration with the current landscape of college athletics shows.
“But in this day and age, with everything that goes on behind the scenes, with people coming after players, you look at, hey, this program lost a couple players that maybe they didn’t expect to, and now all of a sudden they’ve got the feelers out,” Weekly said.
“And so when you get those ones that you’re like, ‘Where did that come from?’ you ask yourself a lot of questions that you’re never gonna get answers to. And I learned a long time ago, don’t take it personal because it’s just a business anymore, and players move. And until we do something from a legislative perspective that restricts the ease of player movement, it’s gonna continue to happen.”
It’s a fight Weekly believes White has been at the front of for years, and she didn’t speak vaguely on where she thinks things have to land.
“I think Danny White’s on the right track, and he’s been on that track for four years, and more people need to listen, and that is the players are really functioning like professional athletes in so many ways, and so we need to put that final restriction on them, I guess,” Weekly said. “Because what’s happening in college sports could never happen in professional sports. If you’re under contract somewhere, you can’t start talking to another program, or somebody representing that program can’t start talking to you.
“As much as I hate it, being somebody who’s been in college athletics as long as I have, and I love the amateurism of college athletics, they’re not anymore. And when they’re actively having conversations about financial situations while we’re still playing, you’re not an amateur anymore. We need to just declare student athletes employees and engage in collective bargaining and sign them to contracts, and those contracts have consequences and restrictions about their ability to move.”
Two loyal coaches on the rise
While players and coaches come and go, Weekly’s staff includes two of the most loyal coaches you will see. She elevated Aubrey Leach-Gartner into a full assistant role and moved Megan Rhodes Smith up to associate head coach, two names she sees running their own programs one day.
With Leach-Gartner, Weekly saw it years ago, back when Leach-Gartner was a player in the program.
“Aubrey was a coach on the field from the day she set foot on campus, and you could just tell what a high softball IQ she had,” Weekly said. “And she was always curious about the game, always asking questions. Just the way she elevated her game through her career, went from freshman, sophomore years, decent years, to then really taking a big jump and becoming an All-American her junior and senior year.”
Leach-Gartner is as driven as it gets, and the goals she sets, she executes them with detailed plans that most would probably struggle to finish.
“And that’s where you really see Aubrey’s capacity for work, because I don’t know too many people who could get their law degree while they’re GA’ing,” Weekly said. “And she was at everything with softball. She didn’t sacrifice anything. But she has the ability to multitask and process things at a really high level pretty quickly.”
Even with Leach-Gartner unable to recruit in the summer because she’s still playing professionally, Weekly sees the trade as a clear win, both for the program and for the players watching her.
“Even though she’s still playing professionally and can’t go out and recruit in the summer, the work that Aubrey does for our program the nine months that she is fully present honestly is probably worth the work of two or three people,” Weekly said. “That’s just how good she is.
“And also, I think it’s important for our young ladies to have somebody on staff who is playing professionally and in our U.S. national team pool, because so many of our girls aspire to that, and then you have somebody you can talk to about, okay, what’s that journey like? What do I need to do? Am I on track?”
Weekly’s read on Rhodes Smith goes back just as far, and it started with curiosity at a camp that made Weekly take notice of how deeply she thinks about the game.
“One of the things that really impressed me about Megan, she was on staff at MTSU as a pitching coach, and she and the other assistant asked if they could come hang out and observe a day of our speed and slap camp in the summer,” Weekly said. “And when they got here, I said, ‘Megan, you’re a pitching coach. Why do you wanna watch slapping?’ And she said, ‘Well, if I’m gonna be a good coach, I should know everything about the game.’ And anybody who has initiative and curiosity is gonna go a long, long way in life, no matter what their profession is.”
It all makes sense now when you look at the numbers of the Tennessee pitching staff. Tennessee’s pitchers are among the best at keeping good offenses in check, and the accolades stack up year after year.
“Her track record since she’s been here speaks for itself. Two All-Americans in one year, and we’ve done that now two out of the last three years, leading the nation in ERA the last two years,” Weekly said. “Megan wants the pitchers to be the best, and she’s gonna set high standards for them and set high standards for herself.”
Returning arms ready for bigger roles
For next season, Weekly expects the staff to keep its strength behind Sage Mardjetko and Erin Nuwer, with two returners ready for more.
“I think the returners besides Sage and Erin, you’ve got Peyton Hardenburger and Maddi Rutan. And I think Maddi had some really outstanding moments this year. I think Peyton did as well,” Weekly said.
“Peyton, it’s going to be fun to watch her because Peyton didn’t really get to pitch in the fall because she was recovering from a torn ACL that she suffered the last game of her high school career. But I think Maddi and Peyton are ready to take a big step.”
With each working with Rhodes Smith, there is great reason to believe that Tennessee will turn in another season of stellar work in the circle.
Elsa Morrison’s leap behind the plate
To complete the battery will be returning catcher Elsa Morrison, who took on a mature responsibility her freshman season.
“She has emotional maturity, so that’s the first thing,” Weekly said. “And that’s not something people always develop. Sometimes they have it at a young age, and she had it. So where that helps her is when you coach Elsa, she’s listening and she’s processing.
“There’s no drama involved. She’s just listening and taking it all in, and then going and applying it. Anyone who’s going to be an engineer has to be able to take in information and apply it pretty quickly, and you see her do that on the softball field.”
The biggest jump came in how Morrison handled the staff from the fall to the spring. Nothing about what she did was easy.
“Elsa as a catcher from September to May is night and day, and you see it in the way she manages the pitchers and handled the pitching staff,” Weekly said. “And that was something she had to get more comfortable at. Elsa grew tremendously in that area. And when she did, you could see our pitchers just have that much more confidence throwing to her, because they could see the confidence she had in the way she ran the field.”
Watching Pickens in the AUSL
As for Pickens, Weekly now gets the opportunity to watch her work at the next level. The former ace is pitching for the Carolina Blaze of the Athletes Unlimited Softball League with Leach-Gartner right behind her, a pairing that is enjoyable to witness.
“I think Karlyn will probably always look at Aubrey as a little bit of a coach, and that’s okay,” Weekly said. “That’s cool. That just shows how much respect she has for Aubrey and her knowledge of the game.”
To Weekly, watching Pickens run her own show in the pros is the job working the way it’s meant to.
“It’s been really gratifying to watch Karlyn, and she’ll have her struggles,” Weekly said. “But the thing that we pride ourselves on here is we want to coach you so that you can coach yourself, and you’re seeing Karlyn be able to do that, because when you get into the professional ranks, yeah, they have coaches, but there’s nobody telling you what to do every day.
“But I’m just so proud to watch her independence and her maturity and how she’s conducting herself as a pro, and I would have expected nothing less after watching how she managed herself four years here.”
Looking ahead to unfinished business
That same independence is what Weekly is building toward across the whole program, on the field and off it.
Winning is important to Weekly, and so is keeping a great culture inside the Lady Vols’ program. Doing this at a high level year in and year out isn’t for the faint of heart, and neither is making heavy decisions. If the last couple of weeks since the season ended have shown anything, it is that the standard isn’t wavering, and Weekly knows there is unfinished business.
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