Lady Vol senior Kaiya Wynn ready to start her Kim Caldwell era

The 2025-2026 Lady Vol basketball roster has eight new players on it, but the reality is that there’s nine new members for the season when you add in redshirt senior Kaiya Wynn. 

The 6-foot guard was a part of the roster last season but missed the year due to a torn Achilles she suffered in the pre-season.

Wynn is now back on the floor and working through the rust to get her action in Kim Caldwell era.

“It feels really good,” Wynn said. “I’m really happy and excited to be back out there. Everybody’s giving me a ton of grace just getting my feel back for the game and getting back in shape. I’m just really happy.”

Wynn was not on the floor last season, but she was completely engaged with her teammates and worked to learn anything and everything she could. 

She cried the day it happened once she was trying to process it, then she was just a phenomenal teammate that entire year. She learned, she saw things through a different lens,” Caldwell said on The Mike Keith Show. “Sometimes when you’re in the thick of it, you don’t necessarily get to see how complacent you can be or how lazy you can get or how whiny you can be. She really got to see, oh, this is how we look when we act like this? She’s done a great job of just keeping everyone postive and making sure that people don’t take for granted the hard things. Because she sat there and watched people run, she sat there and watched people go through a two and a half practice just dying to be on the floor. There was many times that she would say, it’s a privilege to be out here and you don’t know that until it’s taken away. We can say that all we want, but young people won’t hear it. When they hear it from somebody who has been sidelined in a devastating way and has fought and fought and fought to come back, they really pay attention to it. She’s done such a good job of just playing through it. She didn’t play for almost a year so she was pretty bad when she came back and she didn’t blink. She was rusty and she didn’t blink and she just kept going and she just went to failure, went to failure, went to failure and she’s one of the toughest kids we have because of that.” 

For Wynn the different lens from the sideline helped chaotic style of Caldwell’s game seem lest chaotic. 

“Definitely the game has slowed down a bit for me,” Wynn said. “I spent like 30-something games on the bench, so being able to go out there and implement the things that I saw from the press or from the offense and things like that have been really good for my game.

I wouldn’t change a thing about what happened. I was really appreciative to grow as a leader vocally and by example by sitting on the bench and really getting to know everybody and getting closer. And then being able to learn from the things I saw from sitting on the bench, how to lead, how to interact with different people and the things from a basketball standpoint.”

Despite not playing last season, Wynn has been and continues to be a vocal leader and one of the most popular players in the locker room.

“You should have seen us when she made her first bucket in practice. We was hype. I can’t wait for Kaiya to be on the court. I love playing with Kaniya. I love the energy that she brings, I can’t wait for it.”

The Lady Vols open exhibition play on October 29th. Her teammates and Wynn can’t wait for her return to game action, but Wynn admits she expect plenty of butterflies on her opening night.

“I’m kind of nervous to play in a game with the lights on, the refs. I’ll probably go out there and foul or something like that just to get my footing back underneath, but I’m really excited to and looking forward to it. When people ask me what I’m looking forward to the most I just say a game, playing against somebody else, playing with refs. So, it’s definitely going to be surreal. I’m probably going to be taken back to my freshman year, when I was playing in my very first game. But I’m looking forward to it.”