“Good game, like I say to every player,” Weekly said. “Good game.”
OKLAHOMA CITY — Tennessee is one win from playing for a national title, and instead of talking about how the Lady Vols got there, Karen Weekly spent part of her Saturday night knocking down a story about what she did or did not say to a former player in a handshake line.
Emma Clarke’s walk-off solo home run in the ninth gave Tennessee a 2-1 win over Texas Tech and a spot in the Women’s College World Series semifinals. That should have been the only headline.
After the game, Texas Tech third baseman Taylor Pannell, who spent three years at Tennessee before transferring to Lubbock last summer, told reporters that Weekly used the postgame handshake line to take a shot at her.
“We were walking through the line just saying ‘good game,’ and she said that I made a mistake instead of saying ‘good game,’ which is kind of crazy,” Pannell said. “Like celebrate with your team. I just think it’s funny she’s still thinking about it. It’s old news. Whatever.”
Weekly tells it differently, and she did not leave much room in between. When she was asked at her own press conference what she said to Pannell, the answer was short.
“Good game, like I say to every player,” Weekly said. “Good game.”
She went further with Cora Hall of Knox News, calling the accusation an outright lie.
“If you rewatch at the tape of the handshake line, you’re going to see me go just as fast by her as anybody else,” Weekly told Hall. “I didn’t even know where she was in the handshake line. That’s an outright lie. I said good game like I said to every other player.”
Nobody standing nearby backed up Pannell’s version. Texas Tech coach Gerry Glasco said the exchange, if there was one, happened where he could not see it.
“I thought everything was normal,” Glasco said. “I went through the handshake line, nothing. It happened behind me. So I don’t know exactly what happened.”
So you are left with two people, two accounts. Only they know what passed between them in that line, and they are telling the public opposite things.
Her old school was already on Pannell’s mind before anyone asked her about a handshake. Earlier in the press conference, I asked her a straight softball question, whether her time at Tennessee let her give her teammates any insight on what they would see from Karlyn Pickens and Sage Mardjetko.
“I think we went in and we watched film, and we went in and had a game plan,” Pannell said. “I had a little help from my previous team, but I wasn’t getting wrapped up, it was my previous school. Just taking it like another ballgame.”
There was nothing emotional in it. The question was about the scouting report and nothing else. She steered to the it-was-my-previous-school framing on her own, which is worth noting given where the next question went.
What makes this more than a he-said, she-said out of a handshake line is the history sitting underneath it. Immediately after the 2025 season, Pannell entered the portal with a do-not-contact tag and committed to Texas Tech the same day. Weekly did not stay quiet about how that kind of thing happens. After the departure, Weekly posted her own take on the state of the sport.
“I think we can all agree on 2 things,” Weekly wrote. “1) women making money in sports is awesome and long overdue; 2) contacting players (directly or indirectly) before their season ends and signing them to NIL deals before they enter the portal is wrong. Money isn’t the issue, tampering is!”
That is the backdrop to this whole thing. A coach who already said publicly she believes the rules got bent on the way out, and a player who left under exactly the circumstances the coach was describing. The handshake line, or any close encounter between the two, was always going to be a storyline the moment these two teams drew each other in Oklahoma City.
Pannell scored the run that pushed the game to extra innings before Clarke ended it. The plays made on the field are what could have ruled the postgame conversations around this game. Instead, people are speculating and arguing over who is telling the truth.
The question is what got said when the game was over, and the two people who know are not going to agree on it. Tennessee has the upper hand in all of this and moves on to the national semifinals. Texas Tech, on the other hand, has to defeat the UCLA Bruins on Sunday to keep its season alive.
The unfortunate part is what got slightly overshadowed in it. This was a classic, a one-run game settled in extra innings with a trip to the semifinals on the line, and it ended up sharing the night with a claim that Weekly was holding a grudge or taking a free shot at a player who used to wear her uniform. Softball deserved better than that.
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