David Jean-Baptiste looked around and all the players he’d practiced with during the 2016-17 season with the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball program were gone.
He then realized that the guys he suited up with last season were gone, too.
The 6-foot-1 sophomore guard is the only returning Moc who played more than 10 games. There are others – junior Jerry Johnson, sophomore Ramon Vila and redshirt freshmen Justin Brown and Duane Moss – who were with the program, but Johnson and Vila were transfers who had to sit out last season while Brown and Moss missed all or most of it with injuries.
Jean-Baptiste was one of two UTC players who appeared in all 33 games last season, making 17 starts and averaging 6.3 points, 2.1 rebounds and 1.9 assists in 27 minutes per game. But all the other rotation guys – Joshua Phillips (graduated), Makinde London (pro), Nat Dixon (Southern Methodist), Rodney Chatman (Dayton) and Makale Foreman (Stony Brook) – have moved on, leaving Jean-Baptiste as the last man standing.
“I just take this as a new beginning, a new team,” he said recently. “I just try to make all the new people feel welcome. This is a great place to be, a great city to be in, but you can see the new players have adjusted well.”