University of Tennessee at Chattanooga basketball coach Lamont Paris has built his program from the bottom, and he’s done it the hard way.
So it’s almost fitting that the final step for the program’s five-year journey from worst to first in the league standings would be difficult.
In his first season, he had the youngest team in the country, lost to NCAA Division II Francis Marion in his first game as head coach and won just three conference games, finishing last in the league. The roster has been flipped more times than pancakes at IHOP over the years, and this season was the first time he returned half of his production from the previous season. In the early years it was customary to see no fewer than four or five players from that season hit the transfer portal, and they’d be replaced by a new crop. Yet each season the Mocs improved – the team won 10 games in Paris’ first season; it won 10 non-conference games this year – and despite the frustrations both inside and outside of the program because the job hasn’t been finished yet, it’s within reach.
The Mocs (22-7, 12-4) entered last week needing just one win in one of its final four games to clinch the league’s top seed in next week’s conference tournament, with three of those games – against UNC Greensboro, Virginia Military Institute and Samford – at home.
In a league as balanced as the SoCon, the top seed means little more than an automatic bid in the National Invitational Tournament should that team not win the conference tournament. But UTC was the preseason favorite, and has lived up to it so far with a season sweep of second-place Furman that has put this team on the cusp of winning a title.
The second win at Furman on Feb. 12 put them in this position. The Mocs would assuredly win last week and erase any doubt, right?
Nope. The losses to UNCG and VMI appeared to follow similar scripts, with the Mocs falling behind early, then clawing their way back before falling late.
“We had a great opportunity,” sophomore guard Malachi Smith said Saturday. “It’s frustrating we had that opportunity (to clinch the top seed at home) and let it go. I don’t know what it is, but we keep starting slow. I know we have a chance to win it outright with these last two games. We still have an opportunity, but we just have to put this game behind us and move forward.
“We’re just missing easy shots. I feel like the storm has to end at some point. We’ll start hitting shots. I don’t really have an answer for it; shots just aren’t falling. We have to play better defense though because that’s something we can control.”
Now the job is to either win Wednesday on the road at rival East Tennessee State – undoubtedly angry after the Mocs won by 30 in Chattanooga on Dec. 30 – or against a Samford team Saturday at home that is possibly the hottest in the league with wins in eight of its last nine games.
“We have to get back to defending at a high level. We’ve got to put it all together,” Paris said Saturday. “You’ve got to have a day where you’re pretty decent offensively, and I think pretty good is your baseline defensively because it’s so effort-related, so discipline related. It’s based on your decisions, whereas offense is kind of based on how you actually make the shot or don’t make the shot. Some other stuff goes in it, but I think that would be an important thing.
“We just have to get back to doing what we do.”
If they do, they will have reached the first goal.
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @genehenley3.
Staff Photo by Matt Hamilton / UTC players listen to coach Lamont Paris before taking the court in the final moments of a 73-70 loss to UNC Greensboro at McKenzie Arena on Thursday, February 17, 2022.