Randy Smith
It's hard to believe it has been 40 years since the UTC men's basketball team made their first appearance in the NCAA Division-I basketball tournament. They claimed the Southern Conference Championship in Coach Murray Arnold's second year at the helm, the first of three consecutive league titles. There was a big group of talented newcomers to enter the UTC program that season - a couple of junior college transfers who made a huge impact in Nick Morken and Russ Schoene and a hot shooting guard from Memphis named Willie White. But the catalysts for that 1980-81 squad were both holdovers from Coach Ron Shumate's tenure. Forwards Eric Smith and James Jones were the top two scorers on the team and helped guide the Mocs to a 21-9 overall record.
Just four years earlier, the Mocs had won the Division-II National Championship under Ron Shumate and by 1980, they had made the transition to a D-I program. The team floundered in its first three seasons as a D-I program, going 16-11, 14-13 and 13-14 in Coach Arnold's initial season. A lot of fans and people inside the UTC administration began to feel maybe they had made a mistake by jumping from D-II, where the Mocs were a national power, to D-I which was the highest level of college basketball. UTC could dominate the Armstrong States of the D-II world, but by jumping to D-I and joining the Southern Conference, it was a completely different level of competition.
After going 13-14 in his first year as the Mocs' head coach, Murray Arnold realized the talent needed to improve in a big-time way. He recruited hard and brought in freshmen like Willie White, Chris McCray and Stanford Strickland to accompany juco transfers Morken and Schoene. That recruiting class would arguably be one of the best if not the best in school history. Five players who entered the program and contributed right away for the Mocs, jelled with returning stars Eric Smith and James Jones as well as sophomores Skip Clark and Stanley Lawrence and started UTC on its way to Division-I respectability.
The 1981 Mocs were certainly not the best team in school history but the impact that group made set the tone for a long run of success for UTC basketball. Despite losing to Maryland 81-69 in round one of the NCAA Tournament 40 years ago, the 1981 Mocs let it be known that the transition had been made to D-I. The next year, UTC fashioned a 27-4 record, won the SoCon title again with an impressive 15-1 mark, and won the school's first ever D-I tournament game by knocking off North Carolina State in the first round. After going 13-14 in Coach Arnold's first season, the Mocs would put together a mark of 122-32 in the next five seasons, which was one of the best records in America.
Mocs basketball has been a tremendous success through the years, with plenty of Southern titles, and NCAA Tournament appearances under their belts. But a lot of credit should go to that 1980-81 squad, the last one to ever play in Maclellan Gym. That team started it all for UTC and for that, we should all be grateful.
------
Randy Smith can be reached at rsmithsports@epbfi.com