Special place
Asheville has abundance of good Mocs memories
With both University of Tennessee at Chattanooga basketball teams competing in their respective Southern Conference tournaments this week in Asheville, North Carolina, the Times Free Press takes a look at five memorable moments in UTC hoops history at the Harrah’s Cherokee Center (formerly the Asheville Civic Center).
The teams have combined for 17 titles at the venue, and each will try to add another over the next few days, with the top-seeded women winning their quarterfinal Thursday to get started and the third-seeded men, who have a first-round bye, jumping in with their own quarterfinal Saturday. The women’s title game is set for noon Sunday, while the men’s title will be settled Monday night.
In each case, the winner clinches an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament.
5 Survival mode: Men’s edition
The UTC men won the SoCon tournament three years in a row from 1993-95, and the latter title came by the slimmest of margins, with the Mocs winning their three games in Asheville by a combined eight points as they beat Georgia Southern 70-66, East Tennessee State University 71-69 and
Western Carolina 63-61. UTC’s Brandon Born, a fifth-year senior from Ringgold, averaged 20 points and seven rebounds per game on his way to being named to the SoCon’s all-tournament first team, while fellow forward Pat Henderson had double-doubles in the semifinals and the championship game to make the second team.
4
Survival mode: Women’s edition
The UTC women getting their fifth consecutive SoCon title didn’t come easy in 2017. Although fourth-year head coach Jim Foster’s Mocs routed their first two opponents in Asheville that year, beating Western Carolina 85-41 and UNC Greensboro 75-53, the final moments of the championship game were a bit excruciating for UTC and
its fans. Mercer’s Linnea Rosendal fired what everyone thought was a 3-point attempt for the win, and the ball rolled around the cylinder for what seemed like an eternity before falling off the rim to give the Mocs a 61-59 victory. As it turned out, the shot would have been a twopointer anyway, but that was the final SoCon tourney title for the UTC women until current head coach Shawn Poppie ended the drought last year in his first season.
3 Back in control
Entering the 2013 tournament, the women had lost in the semifinals in backto-back years — in overtime to Samford in 2011 before falling by 25 to Appalachian State the following season — so it made this particular title that much sweeter in what turned out to be Wes Moore’s 15th and final season as UTC’s coach before moving on to the Atlantic Coast Conference at North Carolina State. Making the first of five league titles in a row for the program even more special was how this one went down in the SoCon final,
as Kayla Christopher followed up an Ashlen Dewart miss with 8.2 seconds to play, then had the game-clinching rebound in a 64-63 win.
2 Twice is nice
The UTC teams swept through the 2016 tournament, with Matt McCall’s Mocs winning the men’s program’s first title since 2009 with victories over Samford, 59-54, Western Carolina, 73-69, and ETSU, 73-67, and the women cruising to their fourth consecutive championship.
1 David Jean-Baptiste
The most viral shot in UTC (and perhaps SoCon) history was a 40-foot heave by the senior guard in 2022 that hit nothing but net as the final horn sounded in overtime, giving the UTC men their first SoCon tourney title since 2016 with a 64-63 win over Furman. After a one-point loss to Illinois in the NCAA tourney, coach Lamont Paris — having made a national impression after five seasons in Chattanooga — moved on to the Southeastern Conference at South Carolina, where he has rapidly rebuilt the Gamecocks.