Mocs’ Jean-Baptiste sees ‘new beginning’
David Jean-Baptiste looked around and all the players he’d practiced with during the 201617 season with the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball program were gone.
He then realized that the guys he suited up with last season were gone, too.
The 6-foot-1 sophomore guard is the only returning Moc who played more than 10 games. There are others — junior Jerry Johnson, sophomore Ramon Vila and redshirt freshmen Justin Brown and Duane Moss — who were with the program, but Johnson and Vila were transfers who had to sit out last season while Brown and Moss missed all or most of it with injuries.
Jean-Baptiste was one of two UTC players who appeared in all 33 games last season, making 17 starts and averaging 6.3 points, 2.1 rebounds and 1.9 assists in 27 minutes per game. But all the other rotation guys — Joshua Phillips (graduated), Makinde London (pro), Nat Dixon (Southern Methodist), Rodney Chatman (Dayton) and Makale Foreman (Stony Brook) — have moved on, leaving Jean-Baptiste as the last man standing.
“I just take this as a new beginning, a new team,” he said recently. “I just try to make all the new people feel welcome. This is a great place to be, a great city to be in, but you can see the new players have adjusted well.”
Coach Lamont Paris brought in a graduate transfer, Thomas Smallwood, and a couple of junior college transfers: Rod Johnson and Jonathan Scott. Four true freshmen also have been added to the mix.
Jean-Baptiste said the team looks “hungry.”
He’s the only player on the roster with experience against Southern Conference competition. That lack of team experience, coupled with the Mocs’ last-place finish in the league a year ago, assuredly will have UTC near the bottom of the SoCon rankings once they come out in October. Jean-Baptiste feels that could be a blessing in disguise.
“The way we play in pickups, I know we’re going to surprise a lot of people. I keep that in the back of my mind,” he said. “The young guys, the transfers, Jonathan, Rod — we’re going to surprise a lot of people. I know they’re going to have us low because of how last season went, but that’s good for us. We need to feed off that.”
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @genehenley3.