A.J. Caldwell, Jamal Johnson and Jake Stephens sat in the media room of Harrah’s Cherokee Center Monday night, dejected after their University of Tennessee at Chattanooga basketball team fell one game short of a Southern Conference championship after a 88-79 loss to Furman.
A year ago, things were vastly different for the three: Caldwell was living the dream as one of the key members of the UTC team had just defeated that same Furman program to claim the title; Stephens was finishing up classes at Virginia Military Institute, where he’d completed a superstar career under the tutelage of then-head coach (and soon to be UTC leader) Dan Earl; and Johnson was at Alabama-Birmingham, a couple of weeks shy of entering the transfer portal himself.
That’s just three paths to Chattanooga. This UTC team had so many new parts, with eight new bodies joining seven returning ones. There may have been issues developing on-court chemistry at times due to injuries, but off the court the group was pretty close.
Or, as Johnson said after, “We believed in each other. We became a family.”
But with so much new, those on-court struggles did exist. Stephens was on track to being named mid-major player of the year (which would have given the school consecutive winners of the award with Malachi Smith receiving the honor last year) before an injury on Jan. 18 against Furman cost him the final 11 regular-season games. The team was 11-9 at the time and would go 4-7 in those final games, limping into the SoCon tournament with a 15-16 record and a No. 7 seed, meaning the Mocs would need four wins in four days to repeat as champions.