Lamont Paris’s first University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball team was the youngest in the country in 2017-18, with six freshmen and one senior who wasn’t even part of the program until the second half of the season. The second group of Mocs coached by Paris was the nation’s seventh-youngest team in terms of experience.
So down the stretch of Wednesday’s 74-67 win at Western Carolina, it had to be considered a luxury of sorts for Paris to glance out on the court and see an entire lineup of UTC players with multiple years of college experience capable of finishing the task.
The first half of the seven-point Southern Conference win at the Ramsey Center in Cullowhee, North Carolina, was anything but pretty. That’s not overly surprising, as UTC hadn’t played since losing 74-66 to UNC Greensboro on Jan. 23, which preceded a one-week shutdown for the program after a positive COVID-19 test. It equaled an 11-day layoff in between games, but that may not have been such a bad thing for a team that has played portions of the season with sometimes just eight or nine bodies available for games.
The Mocs (13-5, 4-5) had 10 against the Catamounts (8-10, 1-8), although just eight played. One of those eight, sophomore Prosper Obidiebube, hadn’t played since Dec. 12, but he was pressed into duty as senior Josh Ayeni missed the game due to quarantine.
Down the stretch, though, Obidiebube wasn’t needed. Apparently neither was Ayeni, as the Mocs were able to turn to senior David Jean-Baptiste, senior Darius Banks and sophomore Malachi Smith to make plays. The trio scored 40 of the Mocs’ 46 second-half points, helping the team overcome an eight-point second-half deficit.