Asked Tuesday how he was adjusting to his shelter-in-place life during the coronavirus pandemic, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball coach Lamont Paris chuckled slightly and said, “It’s a good time to learn new things.”
Pressed for details, Paris discussed his recent emersion into Babbel, the online learning app that, in its own words: “Combines communicative didactics, cognitivism, behaviorism and constructivism. Progressive lessons are connected together as an interlinking framework, with each step building towards the next. This guarantees learners the shortest path to real-life conversations.”
Shedding further light on his reasons to embrace Babbel, Paris said, “I’m recruiting a young man right now where it would really help me if I could talk to his parents in Spanish. I want to be able to have a conversation in Spanish. It would even help me with my own players (including Ramon Vila, who is from Spain).”
UTC football coach Rusty Wright would love to have a face-to-face conversation with anyone on his team. Eight weeks have passed since he last saw any of his Mocs in person.
“We usually give them the month of May off after finals,” he said. “But this is the longest amount of time I can remember being away from a football team I’ve coached. We’re a people-driven industry. We’re a college. We’re here because of students. It’s been hard not seeing them in person.”
Staff photo by Robin Rudd / UTC football coach Rusty Wright reacts to a play by the Mocs’ defense during a home game against Furman on Nov. 2, 2019.Many of us are beginning to gently fray around the edges. We need haircuts. We need a hug. A handshake. Maybe both. And that doesn’t begin to cover all those lives ripped apart by the Easter night tornadoes in our area. They need everything. Clothes. Furniture. A roof over their heads. Money. A shoulder to cry on when shoulders are supposed to remain six feet apart due to COVID-19.
As Wright noted on Tuesday: “We can’t take time for granted anymore. I appreciate people a lot more because I’m not around many of them these days. I’d love to see both my parents. I can call every week. But I’d love to give both of them a hug.”
These are some of the serious issues we all wrestle with each day and lose sleep over each night. Will our friends and family dodge the coronavirus, and if not will they survive it? Will we still have a job when this ends? And if not, what then? Will the world that we knew prior to March 12, when everything changed almost overnight, ever return?
Yet both Wright and Paris, along with so many of the rest of us, have also experienced the brighter, more positive side of this.
“Kelley and I were laughing the other day that this is the most we’ve been together since I got fired one time,” Wright said of he and his wife. “(Daughter) Maddie just finished her last class in college (Belmont). We had a nice dinner together that night. Kelley cooks the fancy dinners, I do the simple ones on the grill. It’s been so great having Maddie home for awhile.”
Then there’s the extra golf he’s been able to get in at Council Fire due to the course being split by the Tennessee-Georgia line.
“We can’t play the front nine because it’s in Tennessee (which means it’s been closed due to the coronavirus),” said Wright. “But the back nine is in Georgia, so I’ve played a few rounds on it.”
As for Paris, he says his home “Is as clean as it’s ever been. I make my bed every morning, and I’ve never been a bed maker. I’m cooking more. I love to cook. I was cooking every night, but then I figured I needed to support the local economy more, so now I’m cooking three nights a week.”
He’s also returned to working out on his Total Gym for the first time in years.
“I found out a couple of parts I needed could be found online right here in Tennessee,” he said. “So I ordered them, fixed it and now I’m getting my Chuck Norris on.”
So might his new, more chiseled physique encourage him to shed his coat to reveal his bigger biceps, as former University of Florida and current Oklahoma City Thunder coach Billy Donovan, as well as current Gators coach Mike White, often do?
“No, I think that would be showing off,” Paris replied. “I just hope I look like I’m in enough better shape that people don’t need to ask me what I was doing during the coronavirus.”
Assuming college football returns in the fall, and Wright believes it will, he hopes the fans and the school will reach out to each other to create the best atmosphere possible at Finley Stadium.
“We’ll put you where you want to go,” he said of the possible need to put social distance between each fan. “You want to sit on the grass, sit on the visitors’ side, wherever you want to go. We’ll do whatever we need to do to take care of our fans and get them to come to the games. I’ll take a crowd of 10,000 spread all over the stadium any day.”
But first he needs to get his Mocs back on the practice field for at least four weeks in order to have them ready to play.
“The biggest thing I’m disappointed about it that we lost last spring (due to the flooding of Scrappy Moore Field) and now we’ve lost this spring, too,” Wright said. “We’ve got to catch up fundamentally and that’s going to be hard to do now. These guys are working out on their own, but you can’t simulate practicing together.”
He’s right. But just in case he needs a mature athlete to come to the Mocs’ rescue this autumn, he just might find a 40-something guy down the hallway at McKenzie Arena who speaks semi-fluent Spanish, has a Chuck Norris-inspired body, is self-sufficient enough to cook his own food and make his own bed and is willing to try anything new that might help the team.
Mark WiedmerContact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @TFPWeeds.