Back in 2012, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga experienced a financial impact of close to $2 million from the exposure provided by Steven Fox, still playing golf for the Mocs at the time, winning the U.S. Amateur championship.
But after the past two months, a pleasantly hectic time for the UTC athletic department with success by players and teams and the beginning of major facility improvements, that number could be exponentially higher.
The whirlwind stretch started the first Monday in March with David Jean-Baptiste's 35-foot shot to clinch the Southern Conference men's basketball championship and an NCAA tournament berth for the Mocs. Video of the last-second 3-pointer had "Chattanooga" trending on Twitter, something that would happen twice more due to UTC athletics over the following six weeks.
The first time was when the Mocs nearly defeated Big Ten program Illinois in the first round of the NCAA tourney on March 18, a game that drew 3.47 million viewers on TNT - not far behind the 3.5 million who on that same Friday night watched Duke, in its final season under coach Mike Krzyzewski, take on Cal State Fullerton on CBS.
The second time was this past week, late Thursday night and into Friday, after recent Mocs football standout Cole Strange was selected with the 29th pick in the NFL draft by the New England Patriots. That made Strange, an offensive lineman, the SoCon's first player taken in the first round since 1974.
Mark Wharton, in his fifth school year as athletic director and also a vice chancellor at UTC, spoke Friday about the uptick in interest.
"I just think nationally, people know Chattanooga now," Wharton said. "It's the new high school kids, because after the shot by David, our applications to the school skyrocketed. ... The door to see what Chattanooga is as an institution, but also in athletics where you can go and be something, we've done a lot to be able to take advantage of this exposure."
FALLON FLASHBACKS
This year's appearance in the NCAA Division I men's tourney was the Mocs' 12th overall but the first since 2016. Before that it was 2009, and that, too, brought positive national exposure to Chattanooga.
The week leading up to the first-round game against Connecticut, which would make a run to the Final Four that year, Jimmy Fallon adopted 16th-seeded UTC as his underdog team to root for in March Madness, with clips and features on the team airing during his "Late Night" show on NBC. The "Go Mocs" chant he started during one show is still used at times at McKenzie Arena.
The following school year, the school experienced a 7% increase in enrollment - to 10,526, with 2,209 of those students freshmen. There was a small jump of 2.4% the following year, to 10,781 undergraduate students, but the numbers have failed to reach that since then, staying above 10,000 but no higher than 10,341 in fall 2020. There could be another massive jump next school year, especially when considering that in the past two months the school broke ground on a new athletic complex, hired two new basketball coaches and had the mid-major player of the year in Malachi Smith, who recently declared for the NBA draft.
Attendance at basketball games was 3,368, the highest since the 2016-17 season (3,846). But it wasn't just that; the atmosphere at McKenzie Arena has grown substantially in recent years and the city as a whole became enamored with the basketball program.
And that's where things get interesting. The Chattanooga market hasn't always been receptive to UTC, routinely finding more reasons to not make attending Mocs sporting events a recurring activity. This is in spite of some notable success, including the NCAA men's tourney trip in 2016 and three consecutive Football Championship Subdivision playoff appearances from 2014-16. For whatever reason, the university hasn't been able to seize the moment.
Staff Photo by Matt Hamilton / UTC athletic director Mark Wharton speaks at the start of an April 6 news conference to introduce the school's two new head coaches for men's and women's basketball.SEE MOC CITY?
Could this time be different? With all the improvements, with all the excitement surrounding the recent success of Mocs sports and the university, could the athletic department be in the process of awakening a sleeping giant?
"This is a Division I program right here in your backyard, and now you see you can make it to the top," associate athletic director Andrew Horton said. "You can have success, you can make it to the dance, and the experience is no different than going up the road or down the road, wherever you go. You can come right here to a game in Chattanooga, have a good experience that's customer friendly, and you're in and out and have a good time. You're starting to see more people buying gear, more people coming to games, and you're doing all these great things and expanding and growing and all the positivity that's happening around right now.
"We hope that turns into continued support and growth, be it donations, ticket purchases, attendance. We hope that lends to more visibility for the program and the school."
The past two months have been so hectic for the athletic department, that as the school year starts winding down there hasn't been much time to stop and smell the roses of the aforementioned success.
Right after conducting and finalizing new coaching hires for both the men's and women's basketball programs, Wharton had to deal with the loss of a close family member and is just now getting to a point where he can grab a rose, take a moment and - with the rest of the athletic department - enjoy the fruits of the collective labor while also realizing that continuing to build on the success is paramount to the future.
"It's been fun before to see the progress we're making, but some days you can't really sit back and see what we've done," Wharton said. "There's a lot of factors that can go into parlaying this into great success, but we've got to not be complacent now with what we've done.
"I feel really good where we're positioned. We just can't get comfortable."
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @genehenley3.