The pieces around A.J. Caldwell and David Jean-Baptiste have changed over the years, but that’s fine.
The two have become culture changers for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball program.
Ironically, it was two players from the state of Florida, who largely have nothing more than basketball in common, that have helped guide one of the state’s most successful college programs back to a level of relevance not seen in a few years. Jean-Baptiste, the Haitian native who grew up in Miami, and Caldwell, who hails from Sarasota. The pair played AAU basketball together, starting in eighth grade, and while Jean-Baptiste committed to UTC in the summer of 2015, Caldwell spent a year at South Alabama before transferring.
The pairing almost never happened. After the 2017-18 season, head coach Lamont Paris’s first as the head coach, Jean-Baptiste had looked around, and saw players he came in with – guards Rodney Chatman and Makale Foreman, wing Nat Dixon and forward Makinde London – leave the program. He considered leaving as well, but feeling he wouldn’t have many options after playing just one season, he chose to stay.
“It got tough,” Jean-Baptiste admitted recently. “Those were my boys, and I’m looking around and it’s like, ‘They’re all leaving and I’m just here.’ But everybody’s journey is different and everybody has a different path to be successful, so I think for me I just realized that this was home and I was going to make it mine.”