After playing eight games in 21 days, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga women’s basketball team finally has a little “me” time.
The Lady Mocs are 5-3 in January and the 11-time defending Southern Conference champions are in fifth place in the standings with nine league games remaining.
UTC (9-11, 6-5 SoCon) beat Western Carolina 71-55 on Saturday and doesn’t play again until it hosts the College of Charleston next Monday.
“I just think we need a week to focus on us, instead of worrying about preparing for opponents,” UTC coach Wes Moore said. “We need to focus on what we do and trying to clean things up.”
Moore said most of that cleanup will be on the defensive end. UTC is 10th in the SoCon in points allowed (70.2 per game), and opponents are shooting a league-high 44.2 percent from the field against the Lady Mocs.
“We’ve got to do a better job of helping each other and playing team defense, so this is a great opportunity to work on that stuff instead of the sets that somebody else runs or the inbounds plays,” Moore said. “We can focus on the fundamental things.”
A team winning its last game before a lengthy break, as the Lady Mocs did, is always a positive. If nothing else, it puts the head coach in a better mood.
The Lady Mocs played a solid all-around game against Western Carolina. Whitney Hood scored 20 points, Kylie Lambert was more aggressive offensively and scored 18, and UTC held the Catamounts to 23 points in the second half.
“It helps a lot because now we can go into practice and still work on the things we need to work on, but it will help us [to be able to] feed off of the win,” Lambert said.
Appalachian State and Elon — two teams with wins over the Lady Mocs — sit atop the SoCon with 9-2 and 8-3 records in league play. Samford and UNC Greensboro are tied for third at 6-4, and UTC is alone in fifth.
The Lady Mocs need to make the most of this week because they return to action with four games in eight days.
“I think we’ll get better,” Hood said. “[We will] work on some things we need to work on and go into the second half of the conference play and do better than we’ve been doing.”
Hood leads the SoCon with 21.3 points per game and is second in field-goal percentage (.550) and fourth in rebounding (7.5 per game). A Lady Moc has been voted the SoCon player of the year five seasons in a row, and Hood is among this season’s leading candidates.
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