A season ago, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga women’s basketball coach Deandra Schirmer used her opening statement after an overtime loss to UNC Greensboro in the Southern Conference tournament final to criticize the officiating in that game.
“I feel like our girls were cheated tonight,” Schirmer said while praising UNCG and head coach Trina Patterson. “I felt like our team fought with the spirit of champions. I thought they were more than deserving of winning that game.”
Schirmer’s second-seeded Mocs were 10-for-13 from the foul line that day at the Harrah’s Cherokee Center in Asheville, North Carolina, when the top-seeded Spartans had more than 2 1/2 times as many free throws and made 24 of of those 33 on the way to a 64-56 win.
A year later and in her second season as UTC’s coach, Schirmer faced a similar situation Sunday in Asheville, where another loss in the title game — in this case, the Mocs lost to upstart Samford, which was seeded sixth — dropped the program’s all-time record in SoCon finals to 20-2.
This time, though, Schirmer was more reflective.