ASHEVILLE, N.C. — From veteran players to young stars and the first-year head coach leading them, so many who are part of this season's University of Tennessee at Chattanooga women's basketball team put in the work to put themselves in position for a potential Southern Conference championship.
And now Shawn Poppie's Mocs are one game from that award.
Friday's wire-to-wire victory over East Tennessee State University at the SoCon tournament has second-seeded UTC (19-11) in the title game, where the program has an overwhelmingly successful history at 18-0 but is also making its first appearance since 2017.
The challenge this year? The top-seeded Wofford Terriers (22-8), who swept the regular-season series with the Mocs by an average of 16 points.
Sunday's tipoff at Harrah's Cherokee Center is set for noon. The winner receives the league's automatic bid to the NCAA tournament and will wait for Selection Sunday on March 12 to find out its seed in the 68-team field and its next destination.
But even as the Mocs take on the Terriers in Asheville, back in Chattanooga at McKenzie Arena, there are banners hanging from the rafters that note the aforementioned history. If the current UTC team is able to add another banner, it will certainly stand out by coming a year after the Mocs went 7-23 overall and 5-9 against league foes before a first-round exit in Asheville.
Poppie, a former Virginia Tech assistant, was hired last spring and began a rebuild that put his stamp on the program.
The progress has come from players who are new to UTC — including senior guard Yazz Wazeerud-Din, who transferred from Stetson and became an All-SoCon first-team selection, and forward Raven Thompson, who became the league's freshman of the year — and players who aren't. The holdovers who have helped turn the Mocs around include two former Tennessee high school stars: Abbey Cornelius, who is in her fifth season, and Addie Porter, who is in her second.
Regardless of what happens Sunday, those holdovers have tried to add to UTC's legacy.
"I always want to leave a place better than I found it, and we're all part of that," Cornelius said after Thursday's quarterfinal win over Furman. "We kind of know the history, but we also know that the focus is on this group this year. We just want to return to that championship glory."
It will be a tough task. The Mocs have prided themselves on the defensive end of the court this season, but the Terriers have had success offensively in their two meetings, hitting 10 of 29 3-point attempts in a 64-51 win in Spartanburg, South Carolina, on Jan. 19 before shooting 7-for-15 from behind the arc and 51% from the field in a 72-53 win at McKenzie on Feb. 18.
But while this title hunt is as much about having Cornelius, Porter and versatile third-year player Sigrun Olafsdottir remain on the roster, it's just as much about the new pieces such as Thompson and Wazeerud-Din.
And it's just as much about the head coach, who admitted after Friday's game that he hasn't won anything in his own right.
"We've focused on our culture since the minute that we got here," Poppie said. "They bought in, and I felt like if they did that and we kept working, we'd have a chance. To be honest, I focus so much on them that I forget about being in my first year, and now we have a chance for a championship.
"We had a little pow-wow, about a month and a half ago, right when they were trying to build confidence, and I came in there and said, 'Y'all, I've never won a championship either.' I'm sitting here preaching that we're going to win one, and there's a belief that you're doing it the right way, and maybe confidence to yourself. Even if you've never done it before, you have to believe, and I feel like that was a moment that has really taken off since then."
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com.