Lamont Paris did not have the full picture of what he was walking into when he took over as University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball coach in April 2017, but the former Wisconsin assistant would quickly find out.
He would learn the program had an academic progress rate – a system the NCAA put in place to track both the eligibility of student-athletes as well as the retention of them – of 922, the Mocs’ lowest mark in six seasons. He saw a roster that was already pretty gutted with the expected loss of five seniors, a number that grew to nine exiting players before he ever coached a game at UTC, which caused the dip in APR.
As seasons began and ended, Paris started to figure it out. In 2019, the last year the NCAA tracked APR, the Mocs had a score of 958 – and that progress off the court mirrored progress on it.
Those APR issues limited which players Paris could recruit, and the program won just 22 games in his first two seasons. But as the off-court challenges were addressed, the quality of players he could bring in started to improve, which led to better results. The Mocs won 65 games in his final three seasons, including a 27-8 record this season, when they swept the regular-season and tournament titles in the Southern Conference.
Now, though, the 47-year-old Paris is swapping one SC for another. He was announced as the new head coach at South Carolina on Thursday after his hire was approved by the university’s board of trustees, and the school held an introductory news conference later in the day.