Arianne Whitaker entered the 2017-18 basketball season with a little rust, not having played in a college game in 20 months.
The rust showed a little bit, as the 6-foot-2 University of Tennessee at Chattanooga sophomore post struggled to find her way against the Mocs’ always tough nonconference schedule. But as the season has worn on, she has started to work out some things.
Whitaker has averaged 8.3 points and 8.3 rebounds in her past three games, two of which were wins that helped the Mocs finish their preconference slate with a 9-5 record. They’ll begin Southern Conference action Thursday, hosting UNC Greensboro at 5:30 p.m. before the UTC men play Western Carolina.
“I’m a lot more comfortable now. I feel like I’m coming back into my own,” Whitaker said Tuesday. “I’m doing more, trying to work more and helping my team out more.”
The last part was perhaps the most important part. The Mocs were in dire need of a fourth scorer, with seniors Aryanna and Keiana Gilbert and sophomore Lakelyn Bouldin shouldering a vast majority of the load in the early part of the season. As one of four players who has started all 14 games for UTC, Whitaker seemed like an obvious choice, and in recent games she’s started to deliver.
Her 10-point, 10-rebound performance in a win at Florida was the first double-double for the Winthrop transfer, and she followed that with 10 rebounds against Princeton and 10 points against Hampton.
“It took a while for me to get back into the (game) atmosphere,” Whitaker said. “I’d been practicing, but games are not the same thing and I had to get adjusted.”
She started to figure things out against Indiana but really took the next step against Florida, when “everything just clicked,” she said. She believes that confidence will carry over into the SoCon slate.
“We’ve played some pretty big teams,” she said. “We’re not going to face any teams that really push me the way our nonconference schedule did, and that’s helped me with my confidence. If I can do it against those teams, I can do it in the conference.”
She’s currently UTC’s fourth-leading scorer at 4.9 points per game and third-leading rebounder (5.4), but her recent emergence has aided the Mocs as they continue to grow and improve as a team.
“I think Air taking pressure off of me, Keiana and Lakelyn is huge,” Aryanna Gilbert said after last Thursday’s win over Hampton. “It adds another dimension to our team. I think Arianne is figuring things out and we’re figuring things out as well, so it’s been huge.”
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @genehenleytfp.