Photo Gallery
Street Performance
Melissa, Assistant Editor, set up shop in the river market as a street performer– playing her guitar, and singing songs.
It’s certainly been nice while it lasted, these giant basketball upsets the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga women have been pulling off inside McKenzie Arena the last 21 days.
First up was Big Sister Tennessee on the night before Thanksgiving, a victory to make proud every Moc Maniac who still resents becoming a hyphen school after all those proud years as the University of Chattanooga. Period.
Then came Wednesday night at Bigger Mac, No. 7 Stanford coming to town eight nights before Christmas, though it sadly kept its “Tree” mascot at home. So we’ll never know if it prefers white Christmas lights or colored, LED or traditional C-7s, though being environmentally conscious Stanford, you’d have to think LED.
UTC’s Alicia Payne takes a shot during a 54-46 UTC victory against Stanford at McKenzie Arena.Perhaps we’ve stumbled off course, however. For what a game this was, the Mocs stunning a second Top 10 foe in three weeks, this 54-46 win over the Cardinal both more impressive and more pleasantly surprising, given the pre-game belief that the earlier victory over the then-No. 4 Lady Vols would make Stanford both more focused and wary.
But that’s also where a potential problem with scheduling could arise in the future. What coach in his or her right mind, even a Hall of Famer such as the Cardinal’s Tara VanDerveer, will ever again agree to subjecting their talented teams to a trap door such as McKenzie. In 21 days the place has gone Bermuda Triangle on the sport’s rich and famous. McKenzie: Where Top 10 women’s teams vanish.
Especially when confronted with bespectacled, bedeviling guards such as UTC junior Alicia “Red” Payne.
Statistically speaking, Payne’s performance against Stanford was nothing special: two points, four rebounds, four assists and two steals in 37 minutes of largely quiet work. Every other UTC player who saw the floor against the Cardinal scored more points. Two had more rebounds. One had more steals.
But that didn’t mean VanDerveer wasn’t impressed with Payne’s performance.
“She makes things happen for them,” she said after her team’s third loss in nine games and its lowest point total of the year. “She doesn’t try to do too much. She’s a tough player.”
Toughness was everywhere for these Mocs throughout this titanic triumph. There was sophomore Chelsey Shumpert, she of the game-high 18 points, repeatedly diving on the floor to retrieve loose balls. There was Jasmine Joyner blocking a Stanford shot. Five of them, actually. There was Moses Johnson coming off the bench to score 10 points and grab three rebounds.
Against one of the bluest bluebloods of the women’s game, the Mocs wound up winning both hustle stats (8-5 in steals) and intelligence stats (13-6 in assists, 10-15 in turnovers), a remarkable achievement against the best overall brainiac athletic department in major college sports.
But it was Payne who seemed to put the most pressure on Stanford leading scorer Lili Thompson (19.7 ppg), holding her to nine total points on 3-of-13 field goal shooting.
“Red does stuff other players don’t do,” UTC coach Jim Foster said of the Memphis White Station product. “She’s relentless. She has great instincts. She knows where to be and when to be there.”
Every good team has at least one “Red” Payne, someone both unselfish and unrelenting. Almost no good teams are without at someone willing to be a, um, pain in the opposition’s neck.
“I just try to bring energy,” she said afterward. “I start with my defense. I try to take care of the ball and find players open shots to get them going.”
With Foster’s encouragement, she’s also trying to take a few more shots herself, despite her 39 percent field goal percentage on the season and her 3.8 scoring average.
“I’m trying,” she said after missing all five or her field goal attempts against Stanford. “They aren’t going in, though.”
Yet as long as the Mocs keep giving Foster this kind of withering defense — the Cardinal shot just 27.7 percent from the floor after entering McKenzie with a 46.3 percent field goal percentage — UTC doesn’t need to shoot much better from the floor than they did in Wednesday’s final 11:25, when it failed to hit a single shot from the field.
“How about this?” asked Foster. “I had two guards (Payne and Ka’Vonne Towns) go 1 of 14 from the floor but 6-of-6 at the line. That’s big.”
It’s almost all too big to believe. Kind of like Christmas itself. How can Santa blanket the globe on a single starry night? How can Foster’s Mocs blanket both UT and Stanford in 21 days?
“Coach told us in the huddle,” said Payne, “to get our rest on offense.”
From this day forward, the elite of women’s college basketball will rest on the Mocs at their own peril. Let’s just hope they don’t forever more rest on coming to McKenzie to play them.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com