How Lady Vols assistant Isoken Uzamere juggled Nigerian national team, recruiting

Isoken Uzamere had a whirlwind of a start to her tenure as an assistant coach for Lady Vols basketball.

Uzamere had already committed to be an assistant coach for the Nigerian national team, which was playing in WNBA preseason games against the Los Angeles Sparks, the Minnesota Lynx and Indiana Fever.

When she accepted the job on Tennessee coach Kim Caldwell’s staff on April 7, Uzamere thought she wouldn’t be able to coach the Nigerian national team anymore. Her priority had to be recruiting transfers for Tennessee, which had lost all eight possible returners to the portal.

“But when I talked to Kim, she was like, no, absolutely, you need to do this. She said, we’ll figure it out, we’ll get you back and forth or whatever you need to do, and so that’s really what the game plan was,” Uzamere told reporters on May 19. “And obviously flying back and forth, I got some concealer on hiding these bags under my eyes because I’m still tired. I was tired, but it was cool.”

Uzamere said the few weeks going back and forth to recruit were “insane” but the staff made her transition seamless. She also appreciated that Caldwell still made Uzamere’s own growth in her career a priority.

Uzamere spent the previous four seasons as an assistant for Katie Abrahamson-Henderson at Georgia. Abrahamson-Henderson and Georgia mutually agreed to part ways on April 4.

When new assistant coach Bill Ferrara met with the media on May 13, he said Uzamere was “incredible in the portal,” and she took a red-eye flight back to campus to help sign Texas A&M transfer forward Fatmata Janneh before returning to the Nigerian national team.

Some of the assistant coaches also surprised Uzamere in Indianapolis on April 29 leading up to the game against the Fever on May 2. Ferrara made the trip to see some of his former players from Florida State play, and assistant coaches Jenna Burdette and Lexie Barrier went with him.

Uzamere called the opportunity to coach against WNBA teams a blessing. She created scouting reports and had to organize a lot of information quickly – they only had about a weeklong training camp, and some of the players had never played together before.

It meant a lot to Uzamere to coach with the Nigerian national team being from Benin City in Edo State, Nigeria.

“(It’s) the place where my parents grew up, and it literally defines every single thing I do, you know, being Nigerian, I wear it proud,” Uzamere said. “And so to be able to represent my country, just standing there when they were playing our national anthem, and just a surreal experience. So it was super, super special. I learned a lot, so I’m excited to bring a lot of the things that I learned back here.”

Cora Hall is the University of Tennessee women’s athletics reporter for Knox News. Email: cora.hall@knoxnews.com; X: @corahalll; Bluesky: @corahall.bsky.social‬. Support strong local journalism and unlock premium perks:knoxnews.com/subscribe

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: How Isoken Uzamere recruited for Lady Vols and coached Nigerian national team