Shortly after 4:00 a.m. early Thursday morning, a bus rolled into the darkness of the McKenzie Arena parking lot.
Chattanooga coach John Shulman and his staff was sapped. The Mocs were exhausted. A six-hour ride from Boone, N.C., to Chattanooga had began on a long, looping road that snaked through Appalachia. After some white-knuckled twists and turns, the team bus emerged unscathed and dragged ahead for another 200 miles.
Recounting the ride Thursday afternoon, a tired-eyed Shulman smirked.
“That was the road for our season — a lot of curves and all going downhill,” the coach said in jest.
In reality, though, the entire trip to Appalachian State was an analogy for the UTC season — long, fruitless, discouraging, and, at times, scary. Before boarding the bus home, Shulman saw his team get manhandled by App State, his starters get benched and one player, sophomore Dontay Hampton, collapse in the postgame locker room.
Just another puzzling day in a season full of them for the 2011-12 Mocs.
“It’s been a frustrating ride,” said senior point guard Keegan Bell, one of five UTC starters benched in Wednesday’s 79-70 loss to the Mountaineers. “It’s weird that we were picked first and we’re sixth right now. It’s definitely a hit in the gut.”
In terms of an update on Hampton, his status remains uncertain. After playing the final 16 minutes of the game in a venue that warns visitors of high elevation (3,333 feet above sea level), the Mocs’ backup point guard suffered from a coughing fit and shortness of breath. He was originally going to stay at a North Carolina hospital overnight but instead underwent an EKG and was cleared to travel home.
Hampton visited with doctors Thursday and missed practice. It was hoped he’d be given a clean bill of health, but according to a text late Thursday from Shulman, there will be “more tests (Friday).”
Hampton’s play has continued to improve despite UTC’s recent swoon. He averaged 8.5 points, 2.5 rebounds and 1.7 assists in 18.1 minutes per game over a stretch that saw the team drop 9 of 10.
So now at 10-18 overall, 4-11 in the Southern Conference and 0-13 on the road, the Mocs will trudging through the home stretch of the season. Shulman pulled all of his starters after App State built a 22-point second-half lead and allowed his reserves, primarily Hampton and freshman Ronrico White, to shoot the team back into the game. The backups came up short and the starters were forced to watch it unfold secondhand.
“I wasn’t trying to send a message, I was trying to win the basketball game,” Shulman said. “There was no message being sent. We were down 22. (The lineup) clearly was not working. So you stick the other guys in.
“Whatever message was out there to get, hopefully they got it, but that wasn’t the point.”
Before being pulled, Bell, Ricky Taylor, Omar Wattad and Jahmal Burroughs were a combined 5-for-27 from the field. Drazen Zlovaric (12 points) was the only starter to finish in double figures. In regards to sitting alongside his fellow upperclassmen for the final 15 minutes of the game, Bell said, “It doesn’t shake us up or anything. If that was him wanting to send a message to us or whatever it was, we’re big boys and we can handle ourselves. We know how good we are and how good we can be.”
But time is running out to show it. On Saturday the Mocs face The Citadel — the only SoCon team with a worse record than UTC — in a night game at McKenzie Arena. Games at Furman and home against Samford round out the regular season. From there, the team will likely enter the conference tournament as the North Division’s fifth or sixth seed and look to win four games in four days.
Unless something drastic happens, the Mocs will look the same there as they did in the beginning of the season.
“I don’t see any starting lineup changes unless something happens in the next two days of practice that I don’t know about,” Shulman said. “We’ve been close and close and close, and we just haven’t won. Our first bunch just had a bad first half and a bad start to the second half. Hopefully that’s all that it is."
As for that meandering road out of Boone, Shulman won’t soon forget it. He still looked unnerved Thursday when he said, “We took some different, alternative road home. I don’t think there’s a better ride at Disney than the one we rode on. There’s no way a bus is allowed on the road that we drove home on.”
At least that road ultimately led home.
