The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga will open play in the Southern Conference women’s basketball tournament when it faces Western Carolina at 11 a.m. Thursday at Harrah’s Cherokee Center in Asheville, North Carolina. Here are five things to know about the Mocs heading into the postseason.
1. Reigning champs
When the top-seeded Mocs (25-4) take the court against eighth-seeded Western Carolina (6-23), they’ll begin their bid to repeat as SoCon tournament champions a year after their unlikely title run in Shawn Poppie’s first season as UTC’s coach. Wofford, which beat the Mocs twice during the regular season last year — doing so by a combined 32 points — was probably a better team, but UTC got hot at the right time and put together a defensive masterpiece to win 63-53 in the title game and send the program back to the NCAA tourney for the first time since 2017. UTC forward Raven Thompson, just a freshman at the time, was named MVP of the SoCon tournament.
2. Guaranteed bid
The Mocs built off last year’s success by running roughshod through the 2023-24 regular season, winning 25 games and finishing 13-1 in SoCon play — five games clear of the rest of the league — to earn the program’s 23rd regular-season championship and clinch at the very least the league’s automatic bid to the Women’s National Invitation Tournament. Of course, the Mocs have higher aspirations than that, and 17 of the prior times the Mocs won the SoCon regular-season title, they also won the league’s postseason event and advanced to the NCAA bracket.