It wouldn’t be the most popular thing he could say, but there’s a chance that, in hindsight, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga women’s basketball coach Shawn Poppie believes that Saturday’s 68-64 loss to UNC Greensboro isn’t the worst thing that could have happened.
The Mocs had clinched the Southern Conference regular-season title Thursday with a win over Western Carolina, but as so many of their games had gone this year, it had been more of a struggle than expected as it took a big fourth quarter to pull away from the Catamounts.
The 12-game win streak leading up to Saturday’s loss had been based off a lot of toughness and overcoming some bad habits, and the loss was a product of somebody finally taking advantage of some of those bad habits. The Spartans (18-10, 7-6) shot 73% in the fourth quarter to wipe away what had been a nine-point UTC lead going in.
The Mocs couldn’t even take advantage of UNCG’s poor free throw shooting (7-15) in the final period.
“In the fourth quarter, I thought they just had a will to win,” Poppie said of the Spartans. “It looked like maybe we got tired and expected that things were just going to fall in our lap — like in a sense things have done. Now, we’ve made some plays, but it was almost like we thought we’d be OK and Greensboro said, ‘Na, we’re going to make some plays.’
“I thought we had a couple of stops where they just out-hustled us to loose balls or 50/50 balls on offensive rebounds that didn’t allow us to get any momentum.”
The Mocs have relied on a formula of lots of Jada Guinn plus lots of Raven Thompson plus defense and spot scoring from the rest of the team for success. It hasn’t been a bad formula, as even after Saturday’s loss, the Mocs sit at 23-4. But when it hasn’t worked, it’s because one of the key elements hasn’t played as well. Saturday that was Thompson, who was solid with 11 points and six rebounds, but shot just 3-for-14 against the Spartans’ big front line and turned the ball over three times.
Guinn was solid with 26 points and eight rebounds on the day she and Sigrun Olafsdottir were honored during Senior Day activities, but the spot scoring wasn’t enough. Olafsdottir, Karsen Murphy and Hannah Kohn had seven each, but the defense failed the Mocs down the stretch and the offense wasn’t good enough to keep up.
The Mocs were out-rebounded 39-29 against the Spartans, the largest margin of the season against UTC, which prompted Poppie to state that the team “has to be tougher.”
The Mocs still have the regular-season title — the program’s 23rd — for the first time since 2020, the top seed in the SoCon tournament and two games next week at Furman and at Wofford. But it appears there’s also a little bit of growth still needed to win the tournament championship.
“To be honest with you, I don’t think we’ve played great the last couple of weeks,” Poppie said. “We’ve not been able to get over that hump and learn during wins. It’s been fun winning, and we’ve come away with some close wins down the stretch, but we haven’t played well and we’ve got to get back to playing well. Maybe a loss is what can refocus us.
“We’re going to have to look at some things, make some adjustments, but we’ve got to just play better. We have two more games to figure it out to get some momentum back before we head to Asheville.”
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com.