Faster, stronger, quicker and deeper than it was a year ago, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball team plunges into the meat of its Southern Conference schedule with a home game against Furman tonight at 7 and another Monday at 8 p.m. against Wofford.
But there’s an added dimension to this season’s Mocs: They’re more confident.
The Mocs (8-6, 1-0) have looked solid in winning five of their last six games, and the visit from the Paladins will begin a stretch of four games in eight days — all conference contests.
“When we got back from Christmas, we had really good practices,” UTC coach Will Wade said. “I’m excited because we have been improving in practice, we have the right attitude … good cohesiveness … good connectivity and a good attitude as far as getting better in practice.”
The addition of UT-Martin transfer Dee Oldham seems to be good for the program as well. Although the versatile 6-foot-4 guard/forward can’t play in games this season, he’s been helpful in game preparations in practice.
After hosting Furman and Wofford, UTC entertains Western Carolina on Thursday and plays at East Tennessee State a week from today. That called for an added focus on details leading up to tonight, because for the next week all practices will be preparations for the next game.
“We are who we are when we start playing Saturday,” Wade said early in the week. “We’ve got to get better during this practice time, then show it in the games here.”
Junior guard Eric Robertson was a freshman on the 2012-13 Mocs team that finished 13-19. Last season, he said the team “didn’t know what could happen” entering SoCon play. Now a year older and a year wiser with an impressive SoCon win at The Citadel behind them, the Mocs feel good heading into the full-conference slate.
“As a team, we’ve been focusing on the (scouting report) that the coaches give us, and making sure that the other team doesn’t capitalize in areas they’re usually good at,” he said. “This season, we’re a little more confident because we’re coming off a year when we did pretty good in conference.”
Sophomore guard Greg Pryor added that a big part of the improvement and added confidence has come in the way the team has practiced before games.
“Since the Georgia game, our intensity has been better,” he said. “We’ve worked on different ways to play different types of basketball games: zones, hard man-to-man, teams that like to press. We’ve been working on a lot, because we know we’ll see a lot in conference play.
“We are a lot more confident, because we’ve worked hard in the summertime and the preseason to be prepared for the time now.”
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him at twitter.com/genehenleytfp.