Foster’s knowledge of Stringer could help Mocs in opener
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga women’s basketball coach Jim Foster doesn’t know much about the personnel of the Mocs’ season-opening opponent, Rutgers.
But he does know the coach of the Scarlet Knights very well and therefore knows the team’s style and what to expect during Friday’s 2 p.m. game in Piscataway, N.J.
He’s very familiar with C. Vivian Stringer, one of two coaches (Foster is the other) to log 200 wins at three different schools, having done so at NCAA Division II member Cheyney State, Iowa and Rutgers. Foster is not familiar with many players on the roster for Rutgers, which had two players selected in the WNBA draft after last season and had its leading returning scorer, Tyler Scaife (17.2 points per game), announce she was sitting out this season with a medical redshirt.
Foster said Stringer coached at Cheyney around the same time Hall of Fame coach John Chaney — who went on to lead Temple to multiple NCAA tournament appearances — was heading up the men’s team at the Pennsylvania school, and Foster said Stringer and Chaney are a lot alike and have a similar philosophy toward basketball.
“It doesn’t make preparing difficult at all when you know the head coach,” Foster said earlier this week. “I’ve known Vivian for 39 years. I know how her teams play, whether it’s Cheyney State, Iowa or Rutgers. “There’s a style.” Stringer knew very little about her team in a recent Big Ten conference call, not even going as far as naming any particular player she expected to lead the team. She stocked her team with transfers to go along with a couple of players who contributed last season — sophomore guard Khadaizha Sanders and Shrita Parker, now the team’s leading returning scorer (5.1 points per game).
“There’s obviously a real serious makeover,” Stringer said. “We’re working hard and we might surprise a lot of people toward the end, but we’re a serious work in progress. That process has begun, though, and in the end we will get where we want to be.”
The Mocs will enter the game far more experienced, with nine juniors and seniors on the roster. One of those players, junior guard Chelsey Shumpert, will be back in action for the first time since a knee injury took all but three games of last season for her.
She said that nothing has changed for the team as far as preparation, even playing an unknown team with new personnel.
“Every team we face, we kind of do the same thing,” Shumpert said. “We scout, but every team we play we’re going to go out there like they’re the highest team. We’re not just going to say because they lost somebody we don’t need to prepare this much.
“Every team is capable of anything. We just have to stay after it, do the job and we’ll be fine.”