Whether it was happiness with the end result or relief that the process was over, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga administrators couldn’t contain their excitement Wednesday afternoon at the opening news conferences for basketball coaches Dan Earl and Shawn Poppie.
The six-person leadership team – vice chancellor and athletic director Mark Wharton and assistant ADs Emily Blackman, Jay Blackman, Laura Herron, Andrew Horton and Ken Jones – had set an aggressive deadline of March 30 to hire new leaders for both Mocs basketball programs.
Did they think it was realistic?
“We did,” Jones said. “You set a date and you get it done.”
Part of the challenge in getting it done was identifying what each program was going to need.
Prior to the men’s Southern Conference championship game on March 7, UTC leadership had made the decision to part ways with women’s coach Katie Burrows after four seasons, news that was announced a day later. UTC administrators also had a pretty good idea that they were going to lose men’s coach Lamont Paris, who was becoming a hot commodity after building up the program over five seasons – they just didn’t know when.
The UTC men had already won the SoCon regular-season championship, guaranteeing a spot in the National Invitation Tournament if the Mocs didn’t win the conference tourney title, so Horton had been working on NIT plans just in case.
But when David Jean-Baptiste’s last-second shot against Furman pierced the net in Asheville, North Carolina, sending the Mocs to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2016, that necessity had ended and the focus turned to NCAA preparation. That included getting travel lists together for what would be a trip to Pittsburgh – a trip Herron couldn’t make as she stayed back in Chattanooga to work a softball tournament as well as start on the process of vetting candidates for the women’s position.
Staff photo by Matt Hamilton / UTC women’s basketball coach Shawn Poppie speaks Wednesday during his introductory news conference on campus.That process got twice as hard four days after the UTC men’s first-round loss to Illinois, when on Tuesday, March 22, it was widely reported that Paris had agreed to become the head coach at South Carolina. Two days later, his hire was approved by that school’s board of trustees and an introductory news conference was held. UTC’s leadership group had already been using the Parker Executive Search firm out of Atlanta to identify candidates for the women’s job, and they had to add the men’s job to the ledger.
The week Paris departed, a walk through the fourth floor of McKenzie Arena would lead to the discovery of only a bunch of closed doors, as administrators were locked in. There were interviews Tuesday and Wednesday for the women’s program candidates, then Thursday and Friday for the men’s position. Those were used to narrow down potential coaches to the final list of candidates, who were flown into Atlanta for in-person interviews on March 28-29 – a day after Jones drove a van of the committee members down to the Georgia capital.
It was a lot for the group to deal with, and while “fun” may not have been the ideal word to describe the hectic two-week process (“We probably got about 20 hours of sleep,” Jones said), it probably belonged in there somewhere.
“It was a good opportunity to learn,” Horton said. “It was challenging, but yeah, it was fun, too.”
Staff photo by Matt Hamilton / UTC men’s basketball coach Dan Earl talks with guests after his introductory news conference Wednesday on campus.News started to trickle out about Poppie taking over the women’s program on March 29, and Wharton announced the former Virginia Tech assistant’s hire the next day, a little more than three weeks after the job officially opened. On March 30, it was Earl’s name making the rounds, and the next day Wharton announced the former Virginia Military Institute coach was coming to UTC – seven days after Paris officially exited and less than 24 hours before the calendar flipped to April.
Right on time.
“During the process, I’m nervous and stressed out. Some of the people on the leadership team are mildly nervous, and some are being humorous during the thing,” Wharton said. “But it was great to have this team help make the decision on what’s best for Chattanooga basketball. I didn’t want to win the press conference; I want to win championships, and at the end of the day, I think the two we got, we’re going to win championships and win championships quick.
“I’ll get the blame if things go bad, and they’ll get the credit when it goes good. But I take a great amount of joy in that.”
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @genehenley3.