If University of Tennessee at Chattanooga women's basketball players could turn back the hands of time, maybe they would go back and put together a solid 40-minute performance against Louisville on Nov. 21.
But the Mocs can't. They missed shots. They made mental mistakes. They trailed by 14 points less than five minutes into the game and weren't able to make any of it up in a 63-47 defeat, their third loss in six games to start the season and the beginning of a four-game losing streak
Once point guard Chelsey Shumpert returned to action from injury (she did not play at Louisville), though, the Mocs started to perform a lot better, going 18-4 after the slump and winning the program's fifth consecutive Southern Conference championship.
They'll return Saturday to the site where the slump began, facing the Cardinals (27-7) in the first round of the NCAA tournament at the KFC Yum! Center at 1:30 p.m. UTC (21-10) is the No. 13 seed in the Oklahoma City Regional, with Louisville seeded fourth. Saturday's second game at Louisville will match 12th-seeded Dayton (22-9) and No. 5 seed Tennessee (19-11).
"We move the ball better and we know each other a lot better," senior guard Queen Alford said Wednesday regarding the Mocs' improvements since the early season. "If we had the opportunity to play those teams over, it would be a different outcome."
They'll get that chance against the Cardinals. In the first meeting, though, the Mocs were out of sorts, turning the ball over 19 times. Alford finished with 20 points, handling nearly half of UTC's scoring. All-SoCon first-team center Jasmine Joyner was only 1-for-9 from the field and had two points, although she grabbed 15 rebounds and blocked seven shots.
"The difference between the team now and the team then is night and day," UTC coach Jim Foster said. "There's no resemblance. What we did learn was to fight through and play hard in that game. We didn't play with our heads, but we played harder at a certain point, and we played through to the end."
The Mocs trailed 19-5 with 5:27 left in the first quarter and 25-12 at the end of the priod. They made two of their first nine shot attempts and were 5-for-17 in the period, and they had three of their five first-quarter turnovers in the first 4:34 of the game.
It was the first of three games against teams ranked in the top five at that time, and the Mocs admitted the possibility of shell shock early. But this team is not that team.
"We're more mature than that team," Joyner said. "We do things different. There are a lot of things that we've seen on film that we would do different.
"We're tougher - more tough than that team that played Louisville the first time."
Foster said the loss at Louisville "was the start of something."
"It made us aware that there was another level of intensity necessary," he said. "It made us aware - some people by watching, some by experiencing, some by growing up - that the whole reason for scheduling was for people to understand that we aren't quite as good as we think we are.
"We can get a lot better, but there's nothing wrong with being humbled."
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @genehenleytfp.