Before the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga women’s basketball players learned to win with each other this season, they had to learn how to coexist with each other.
That may have been the hardest part of the process.
In each of UTC coach Jim Foster’s first two seasons, he had experienced players who knew how to handle success. His first season, he had players such as 2013-14 Southern Conference player of the year Taylor Hall and four other seniors who knew what it meant to battle through a schedule. His second season, the team was led by Ka’Vonne Towns and fifth-year senior Destiny Bramblett.
With only one senior on the roster and a number of underclassmen expected to play larger roles this season, there was going to be a maturation curve. That curve was impacted by a brutal nonconference schedule, as well as the loss of junior guard Chelsey Shumpert to a knee injury in the third game of the season.
There were peaks and valleys, but after back-to-back SoCon losses at Mercer and Samford in late January, the team turned the corner and hasn’t lost since, having won eight straight games entering today’s SoCon tournament quarterfinal against Western Carolina at 4 p.m. at the U.S. Cellular Center in Asheville, N.C. The Mocs (21-7) are seeded second, the Catamounts (7-21) are seeded seventh.
“We’re playing our best basketball of the year,” Foster said. “We’ve grown up a lot.”
Foster said the team had to learn how to be together on the road for a number of days.
And players were looking to other players for leadership, with no one Moc quite ready for that responsibility.
So they’ve done it collectively. There’s a lot more communication in practice, and with that communication as well as time simply being together, the team has developed chemistry that fueled the current streak, which includes wins over the first, third and fourth seeds in the tournament by a combined 69 points in the Mocs’ final three games of the regular season.
“In November, some players had to find themselves, how they fit and what they should do,” junior center Jasmine Joyner said. “Now people have found themselves. A year ago, we had players we had played with more, but we’ve created chemistry now that has made us a better team.
“We had to grow up to make the chemistry.”
That growth has certainly been a welcome development for Foster, who never wavered in his thoughts about the Mocs when they were suffering lopsided losses. He continued to preach that the team needed to figure out its identity.
With tournament time here, it seems as though his players have done just that.
“We’ve matured a lot,” Foster said. “We were a young team in a lot of respects, but a lot have grown up through their experiences this year. The last couple of years we let some be our leaders and be in charge, but that kept us from the responsibility of growing up. The adversity of this year facilitated a growth process that I, for one, find delightful.
“It’s fun to be in a gym with mature people.”
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @genehenleytfp.