UTC men working to be better at end

The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball team and first-year coach Lamont Paris have figured how to be competitive in every game.

Now they have to figure out how to close a few more of them out with victories.

The Mocs found themselves in yet another Southern Conference road game with the score close late Thursday night, but their execution — or lack thereof — hurt them in a 70-68 loss to Western Carolina. The defeat dropped the Mocs to 3-7 this season in games decided by five or fewer points, and they also lost 110-101 in overtime at The Citadel on Jan. 13.

This season, the Mocs (8-16, 2-9) have been decent at home, where they’re 7-6. But they’re 1-10 away from McKenzie Arena as they prepare to face SoCon-leading East Tennessee State University (20-4, 11-0) at 4 this afternoon at Freedom Hall in Johnson City, Tenn.

Thursday’s game followed a similar script to previous UTC losses, with little things that didn’t seem like big problems at the time turning out to be huge in the end. The Mocs led by a point with 1:22 to play after a Nat Dixon 3-pointer and were tied after the 6-foot-4 junior made a running bank shot with 36 seconds to play, but a questionable foul call on UTC’s Makinde London — his fifth — led to a pair of Mike Amius free throws with 16.2 seconds to play.

“We did not play well, and I didn’t have a good feeling about it,” Paris said after the game. “Sometimes you feel OK being down five, but I didn’t feel good where we were for the majority of the game.

“There’s a lot of components that go into winning a basketball game, and one of them is just playing — just playing basketball. Guys have to and need to get better.”

And in some aspects, they’re close. In last month’s loss at The Citadel, UTC held a lead with 4:26 to play but lost it and had to make a couple of clutch free throws to force overtime.

Two nights later at Mercer, a circus shot by UTC’s Joshua Phillips forced another overtime before the Mocs fell 75-71. Five nights later, they led with 4:26 to go at Wofford before losing 71-67.

Now they face ETSU, which has won 14 in a row overall and is 11-1 at home this season.

“I wish I had an answer for that,” Dixon said of the road losses. “We just have to put our heads down, keep fighting and don’t let things get to us or bother us. When things don’t go our way, it has to fuel us and we have to come 10 times harder the next play.”

But close isn’t going to cut it. The Mocs have earned the respect of teams and fans around the league by being competitive, but unless that respect can be converted to wins, nobody around the Chattanooga program is going to be happy about it.

“It’s just going to take some grit, some more hard work,” said sophomore Makale Foreman, who grew up in Kingsport, less than 30 minutes from the site of today’s game. “We have to get stops on the defensive end, because what it comes down to is that if we get stops, they don’t score.

“It’s hard to come into another team’s arena, but we have to play hard, keep playing and go from there.”