In hindsight, success may have come too quickly for Matt McCall.
Through his first 54 games as the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball head coach — a two-year tenure from 2015-17 — McCall was 44-10, with wins over Georgia, Illinois, Dayton and Tennessee. In fact, the win over the Vols, an 82-69 win in the official 2016-17 season opener, was basically expected. That’s how good the start of McCall’s tenure was.
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But then the difficulty came. A lot of people around the program realized then how important senior forward Chuck Ester was, so when the versatile 6-foot-7 senior — who had been important in the Mocs’ Southern Conference championship run the year prior— went down with an injury in the first minute of a preseason scrimmage and was lost for the season, it was the start of a group that never fully built off the prior season’s success.
The Mocs — 29-6 in McCall’s first season — started the next year 15-4, only to lose eight of the team’s final 12 games and bow out in the quarterfinals of the SoCon tournament. McCall, once one of the hottest coaching candidates in the country, left for UMass, where he won just 43% of his games and was dismissed after five seasons.