Seniors lead.
With the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga women's basketball team trailing Samford going into the fourth quarter of its regular-season finale Saturday, the Mocs' lone playing senior - Aryanna Gilbert - did just that.
Gilbert scored 11 points in the final period, including the go-ahead layup with 1:11 to play, and UTC defeated the Bulldogs 71-65 in the Southern Conference game in Birmingham, Ala.
The win gave the Mocs (17-11, 8-6) the third seed going into this week's conference tournament in Asheville, N.C. They'll face UNC Greensboro in the quarterfinals Thursday at 5:45 p.m..
The Mocs could have fallen to the No. 5 seed had they lost Saturday's game, but Gilbert made sure that wasn't the case. With her sister Keiana out for the second consecutive game with an ankle injury, the 5-foot-9 Aryanna had 19 points while playing all but six seconds of game time. She added five rebounds and four assists, and sophomore Lakelyn Bouldin and freshman Brooke Burns scored 12 points each. Bouldin added seven rebounds.
With the posts struggling against the Bulldogs, junior Shelbie Davenport played all but one minute of the second half and finished with eight points and seven rebounds. Point guard Molly Melton had nine points, connecting on three of four 3-point attempts.
"Our bench did a great job," UTC coach Jim Foster said on the postgame radio broadcast. "I thought Molly came in and did a good job today. She had not been taking shots. Your stat sheet can't be zeros. Today she took shots and they were very makeable shots, and they were well within her ability and shots that she works on in a religious way daily. To be shy in the game, you can't be that, and I think she's gotten comfortable and she's made some good shots.
"Shelbie knows there are games that she knows she can really, really impact and there are games where it's a mismatch situation not in our favor. Her tempo, she's really worked hard at not putting the ball on the floor just to put the ball on the floor. We started about a month ago, doing a lot of one-on-one with one dribble; one-on-one with two dribbles; one-on-one with combination dribbles.
"Quite frankly you're starting to see some of the players improve in the framework of that. I think Shelbie's one of them. She's never going to be a great one-on-one player, she's got a little hitch in her shot, but the fact that she is taking a little more time and her first dribble is not necessarily down at her feet, she's getting somewhere with it. It's starting to make a difference. It's a good difference."
The Mocs fell behind 17-3 early Saturday but used a 13-0 run to get back into the game in the second quarter. There were six ties and 11 lead changes the rest of the way, with Gilbert's final basket - in which she used a jab-step, then drove and finished with her left hand - putting the Mocs in front for good.
For good measure, she knocked down four free throws in the final 15 seconds for the final margin.
The Mocs as a team were 10-for-10 at the foul line in the fourth quarter and made all 14 attempts for the game. They also made 11 3-pointers.
"Our 3-point shooting for the third game in a row was 50 percent," Foster said. "We knew we had a good 3-point-shooting team; it just took a while when you're so discombobulated with who is going to be on the floor. Now we're a little more settled.
"Obviously Kei is not out there. We've got to do things a little differently. For the most part we did a good job not turning the ball over a lot. Down 17-3 on somebody else's floor on senior day, I thought we did a good job of climbing back in, clawing back in, hanging in and at the end just separated ourselves."
Olivia Crozier had 15 points to lead Samford (14-15, 6-8), who finished with the fifth seed.