In his 12 seasons as the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga women’s basketball coach, Wes Moore turned the Lady Mocs into a Southern Conference dynasty. Now, in a move that seemed more inevitable with each league championship, he’s moving on to a new challenge at a bigger school.
The five-time SoCon coach of the year has been hired by East Carolina to replace Sharon Baldwin-Tener, who resigned on April 16. He’s flying to Greenville, N.C., this morning and will be introduced at a news conference at 4 p.m.
Moore, 53, informed the Lady Mocs, as well as UTC’s five incoming freshmen, of his decision late Sunday night — a decision he spent several days making. During a 23-minute interview with the Times Free Press on Monday, Moore wiped away tears several times as he talked about leaving a job he would have been happy to keep until he retired.
“It’s hard to leave the players here, the people here. Chattanooga is always going to be special to me,” he said.
Moore said the entire process lasted about a week. He said former UTC men’s basketball coach Mack McCarthy first contacted him about the job. McCarthy was replaced recently as ECU’s coach by Jeff Lebo, another former Mocs coach, but remains part of the athletic department.
Moore’s wife, Linda, is from Jamesville, N.C. — about 45 miles from ECU’s campus — where her parents and most of her family still lives.
“I think initially it was the opportunity to get my wife back near her family that probably is what at least had me looking at the opportunity,” he said. “As I took a closer look, (athletic director) Terry Holland seems to be trying to get East Carolina headed up the ladder, so to speak.
“I’m just very impressed with the commitment and the energy that I felt.”
The Lady Mocs lost more games than they won in Moore’s first season, going 10-17 in 1998-99. They never came close to doing that again.
Moore went 290-85 in his 12 seasons at UTC, winning the SoCon regular-season title a record 11 consecutive times. His Lady Mocs posted 11 straight 20-win seasons and won the SoCon tournament eight times.
“It’s probably one of those things that you have to stop and survey the depth and breadth of his contributions, if you can even do that, to fully appreciate what he’s meant to the university and the community the last 12 years,” athletic director Rick Hart said.
Because of Moore’s success, a lot of UTC fans knew this day would come, that sooner or later the right opportunity was going to come along that he couldn’t turn down.
“I did,” UTC chancellor Roger Brown said. “I feel really fortunate that he had made such a commitment to UTC and stayed here as long as he did.”
Junior guard Kori Penland, who’s from Chickamauga, said it was all but “inevitable” that Moore one day would leave. But, she said, “it’s really surreal that he’s actually leaving.”
For years Moore’s name was mentioned with almost every big-school vacancy in the South. He was a finalist for the jobs at South Carolina in 2008 and North Carolina State in 2009.
Moore’s UTC salary, counting bonuses, was around $150,000 a year. East Carolina isn’t paying him twice that much, but he said he has a generous six-year contract. He will also have significantly bigger recruiting and travel budgets.
Hart said the search for a new coach has already begun. One name that won’t be on the list is associate head coach Nikki Blassingame, who will follow Moore to ECU. Moore said assistant Mike Murray will likely go as well. Assistant Amanda Eaton-Burge has elected to stay, he said, and she will handle the day-to-day basketball operations until a new coach is named.
East Carolina doesn’t have the kind of tradition that Moore built at UTC, but it was a program on the rise during Baldwin-Tener’s nine seasons. The Pirates went 23-11 last season, the second-most wins in school history, and won a round in the WNIT. Baldwin-Tener had four winning seasons and led ECU to the 2007 NCAA tournament, its first appearance in 25 years.
“I think it is a sleeping giant,” Moore said.
If his legacy is the remarkable success he was able to achieve and sustain for more than a decade, his signature moment was the Lady Mocs’ upset of Rutgers in the first round of the 2004 NCAA tournament at McKenzie Arena.
The Lady Mocs have come close to other NCAA tourney wins. In the opening round of this season’s tournament, they led Oklahoma State by 18 points at halftime but couldn’t hold on for the win.
The 2009-10 Lady Mocs went 24-9 and kept the SoCon streak alive despite having four freshmen among their top seven players. Two of those freshmen, Michelle Davis and Erin Helton, quit the team after the season.
Stability has been a hallmark of Moore’s program, but the Lady Mocs now find themselves with no head coach, no seniors on next season’s roster, only two returning starters and no post players who played last season, following the graduation of Shanara Hollinquest and Megan Rollins and the departures of Davis and Helton.
Moore said roster turnover had “nothing to do with” his decision.
“I was looking at next year as a fresh start, a breath of fresh air,” he said. “Let’s all be on the same page and play Chattanooga basketball.”
As it turned out, Moore’s fresh start is at East Carolina.