LOUISVILLE, Ky. - For the first time in nearly three months, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga women's basketball team will enter a game as an underdog.
UTC coach Jim Foster still feels good about the team he's taking into the game.
The Mocs (21-10) will face host Louisville (27-7) in the first round of the NCAA tournament at the KFC Yum! Center at 1:45 p.m. today. Tennessee will play Dayton in the second game 30 minutes after the conclusion of the first.
The Mocs have been through all sorts of wars this season. Battle tested? They check that box with road games against Louisville and Connecticut, top-four seeds in the tournament. They played Notre Dame, another top seed. They battled with Green Bay and Florida Gulf Coast, automatic bid winners, and defeated Stetson, which won the Atlantic Sun regular-season championship over FGCU but fell in the conference tournament final.
They swept Southern Conference regular-season co-champion Mercer, only to find themselves behind by 13 in the third quarter and 10 headed into the fourth before earning a 61-59 victory over the Bears in the SoCon tournament title game.
Now, for UTC to win its first NCAA tournament game since 2005, it must defeat a Cardinals team that won 63-47 in their November meeting at the site of today's game.
"I think we were a little nervous that game," UTC senior center Jasmine Joyner said this week. "It was our first big team we'd played at their home, but since we've played tough teams it will have a familiar feel to it.
"And being the underdogs will make us more hungry."
Foster said that whether his team was the favorite or the underdog, it wouldn't really matter once the game tips off. The team that executes the best is the team that will play again Monday.
"I don't think this time of year it makes a difference in terms of what you've been," Foster said early in the week. "It turns out to be who you are. The experience of the tournament, in my mind, is the teams that come in with a pretty good feeling of who they are and an understanding of what they have to do to be successful and go out and execute like crazy. You don't have to play harder than you play; you are who you are, and this time of year you can't make yourself be somebody you aren't.
"We'll find out Saturday who we are."
Foster said he has a pretty good idea of who the Mocs are but added that he "doesn't take shots or rebound." What the Mocs have become over the past couple of months through team growth and in part due to the rugged schedule is a tough-minded, defensive team that has the ability to make shots from long range as well as convert turnovers or Joyner blocks into points.
This will be the first time that all key parts have been available for a first-round NCAA tournament matchup in Foster's tenure. His first season, Ashlyn Dewart was hobbled with an injury that slowed her against Syracuse. Aryanna Gilbert missed all but eight games in the 2014-15 season with a knee injury, and Chelsey Shumpert played in only three contests last season due to a knee injury.
With one more opportunity to give it a go in the round of 64, the team feels loose.
"We just have to play the best we can," Shumpert said. "Don't be nervous; play, have a good time.
"We're ready for this. We've prepared for it and we have all the confidence in the world. We just have to come out, compete and give it everything we have."
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @genehenleytfp.