UTC became ‘family’ in transition season
A.J. Caldwell, Jamal Johnson and Jake Stephens sat in the media room of Harrah’s Cherokee Center Monday night, dejected after their University of Tennessee at Chattanooga basketball team fell one game short of a Southern Conference championship after a 88-79 loss to Furman.
A year ago, things were vastly different for the three: Caldwell was living the dream as one of the key members of the UTC team had just defeated that same Furman program to claim the title; Stephens was finishing up classes at Virginia Military Institute, where he’d completed a superstar career under the tutelage of then-head coach (and soon to be UTC leader) Dan Earl; and Johnson was at Alabama-Birmingham, a couple of weeks shy of entering the transfer portal himself.
That’s just three paths to Chattanooga. This UTC team had so many new parts, with eight new bodies joining seven returning ones. There may have been issues developing on-court chemistry at times due to injuries, but off the court the group was pretty close.
Or, as Johnson said after, “We believed in each other. We became a family.”
But with so much new, those on-court struggles did exist. Stephens was on track to being named mid-major player of the year (which would have given the school consecutive winners of the award with Malachi Smith receiving the honor last year) before an injury on Jan. 18 against Furman cost him the final 11 regular-season games. The team was 11-9 at the time and would go 4-7 in those final games, limping into the SoCon tournament with a 15-16 record and a No. 7 seed, meaning the Mocs would need four wins in four days to repeat as champions.
So close. The Mocs picked up a 20-point victory over VMI in the play-in round before an upset of second-seeded Samford and a win over Wofford in the semifinals before not being able to get over the hump against the top-seeded Paladins, who won their first SoCon title since 1980.
The story of the season is one of adaptation: adaptation back in August once all of the new players arrived on campus; adaptation once the school found out Honor Huff would not be eligible to play this season for the SoCon’s outdated intraconference transfer rules (Huff came with Earl and Stephens from VMI); adaptation with earlyseason injuries to KC Hankton, Khristion Courseault and Dalvin White; the injury to Stephens and the leave of absence of Jamaal Walker, who missed the final six games.
Caldwell knows about adjusting. He’d spent the past five seasons in Chattanooga after a year at South Alabama, coming in as a walk-on in 2018 and earning a scholarship a couple years later. He’d played with 41 different teammates in his tenure.
“It’s really been some of the best times of my life,” Caldwell said Monday night. “I want to thank Coach Earl for coming in and keeping me on for another year and coaching the way he did, I think he really made me a better player, a better person, and I want to thank Jamal and Jake and all those other guys, too.
“Every year is a little different; it would be easy for us this year to just kind of come in, lose Jake, lose some game and come in here as a seven seed and just roll over and die on the court. But we fought until the end and it was a really special season I’ll remember for a long time.”
Next year will no doubt be different, and much like this season, a bunch of new. The Mocs lose five scholarship seniors, plus junior Grant Ledford, who went through senior day activities and could leave as well. Walker’s status is unknown and it isn’t clear if he will be back at this point, so as it stands the team returns five scholarship players who played this year, plus will welcome Huff as well as three incoming freshmen who signed in November.
There will be a time to look into the future. But the now was this team’s run, which fell one game short of a miracle.
“I’m so proud of the guys and appreciative of their efforts,” Earl said. “I’ve enjoyed being around all of these guys; we’ll always be family.”