March 19, 1977 – Springfield, Mass. - The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men's basketball team scored a 71-62 win over Randolph-Macon College to  capture the NCAA Division II national basketball championship in Springfield, Mass.

Senior forward Wayne Golden, selected the tournament's most valuable player, led the Moccasins with 21 points.  It was UTC's second-straight appearance in the DII title game.  They will move up to Division I next season.

Golden scored six points as Chattanooga outscored Randolph-Macon 10-2 midway through the second half to break open a close game. 

All-tournament senior center Joe Allen led the Yellow Jackets with a game-high 22 points.  Chattanooga finished the season with a 27-5 record, while Randolph-Macon was 23-8. 

UTC guard William Gordon, an all-tournament selection, fouled out with 13:24 left to play.  He still managed 16 points in the win.  Gary Stich had a double-double with 14 points and a game-high 12 rebounds.  Herbert McCray chipped in 13 points for the Mocs. 

Ron Shumate Reviews the Championship Season
From the 1977-78 Media Guide
From a standpoint of last year, you know we opened up with Grambling.  I felt that we had our basketball team as well prepared as you could prepare a team going into a game.  There are very few teams that get out of that place alive, but we felt like if we played well, we had a chance of winning.

We didn't play well that game in the first half.  We ended up getting beat, 64-60, due to a very poor offensive performance from the floor.  Also, I am not saying this is what beat us entirely, but it didn't help when they shot 29 free throws and we shot three.  We just didn't play well enough to win.

Coming home for the first time for our fans, we were fortunate enough to beat Alabama-Huntsville, 100-72, in what we naturally felt like was a good home opener.  We then beat West Georgia, which always has a good basketball team, 85-76, in the Big Mac, in another game I felt like we were fortunate to win.

We went to Western Carolina and played a very fine game.  That always hasn't been the case against the Catamounts: I remember one time a story about some crackers which hurt us in pregame and we never really got ready to go after it on the floor.  We won, 100-76, a big win for us.

Our biggest offensive night of the season came in the next game when we scored 124 points to beat Armstrong State.  We got to play a lot of kids, had a good crowd once again, and it made for an enjoyable basketball evening.  We enjoy those, as you can guess.

We went over to Middle Tennessee and played a game I figure to be one of the big, big keys to our season.  We trailed Middle Tennessee most of the night, both teams were playing very well. Middle, as you know, later played Detroit in the NCAA Tournament, but we've known how good that team is for years. The thing that will be hard to forget about that game is Middle having the ball on our end of the floor with seven seconds to go, us making a steal and tying the game up to send it into overtime.  We did win, 75-73, and it was a big win for us. 

The Middle game took up to Louisville, where we lost up there to a very fine basketball team.  Also, I didn't fell like we played as well as we were capable of playing.  I felt like if we had the opportunity to play them a second time, we would have played a lot better.  It was an enjoyable game, though, due to eight of our 12 kids being from that area and getting an opportunity to play at home in front of family and friends.  Any time you get a chance to play in front of 17,000 people, it is a very valuable experience for your kids in terms of helping your program and getting your team ready for tournament play.

The Choo Choo
Then our Choo Choo Classic proved to be very exciting.  Nebraska-Omaha made its first trip to the Big Mac and went out with a loss before winning the consolation.  Kentucky State was our big game, the Thoroughbreds having but a single loss coming into the game and being very fired up.  The big, big game of the year was our 15-point win over Kentucky State.  They had a fine team, and it was very exciting to win a game over a team that good in front of our home crowd.

After Christmas and New Years we played Samford at home.  When can be remembered about that game?  Well, we did win and we got caught up in the winter snowfall.  With about four inches of snow on the ground, we didn't know if we were going to play or not, but we still drew a very representable crowd, one that didn't mind the weather one bit. About 3500 people braved it to watch us win, 92-77.

Our next game was against Eastern Illinois, which is always a very worthy opponent.  We had played them the year before in the semifinals of the national tournament and they had a lot of kids coming back.  We were on a hot streak, I guess, and put that one away, too.

Our next two games came in two of the roughest places to play basketball you will ever see, and we played down there on a Friday (West Georgia) and a Monday (Tennessee State). West Georgia had won about 69 out of 70 games at home over the last six or seven years and all of Carrollton, Ga., was excited about the Mocs coming to town. Like at Big Mac, they had fans coming out of the woodwork.  This was the first time I had ever taken a ballclub into West Georgia, and it made it very difficult to be a good coach of a good team. We played excellent that night, winning by 11 points. It was a very good win for us.  We didn't know if Wayne Golden would be able to play that night due to a cold, but the team picked it up pretty well, everybody worked hard together to pull out another win.

We then went over to Tennessee State.  The game was on television in Chattanooga, which we always feel to be a plus for our program.  We beat Tennessee State by 16, the first time I had ever beaten Tennessee State at their place. This was a major hurdle for our program, a stigma erased. 

Jacksonville State was next, at our place. We won by 30 that night, a highlight being Wayne's 2,000 career point.  A lot of people celebrate reaching 1,000 but here are our two guards getting 2,000 each.  William Gordon, as you remember, hit that plateau later in the season.

Northern Illinois came to our place for us to work on, and we did by 15 points. This sort of set us up for going to Alabama-Huntsville, I believe.  A memory? We were able to whip them at our place earlier, but they had a good ballclub.  They later played in the NAIA national tournament.  They had us down 20 some points in the first half, but I later got encouraged, from a coaching standpoint. We fought back, fought back, tied the game, but eventually lost 80-76. They had a fine club, as I said, and they deserved to win. They played excellent and we were a little flat.

Belmont was an easy win, which is a good win any time you are on the road.  A true rivalry came up in our next game, as we got Middle Tennessee at home, 101-90.  As you know, they have since dropped us from their schedule.  That's what happens after a while: people tend to want to get off your schedule when you wear'em out a little bit.

Problems
The Livingston win that came up later that week was nice, but it set up what was probable the most important part of our season, the trip to Dayton and Northern Kentucky.  We have been making that swing for several years.  We felt like we played a pretty good game for 30 minutes, but in the last 10 our shot selection was atrocious and we wound up getting beat by eight points. We had beaten Dayton two years in a row and it has been a privilege for us to play a team of that caliber, a truly big time basketball program.  They got after us though.  They had been on a losing streak of about eight games, which isn't surprising when you have some of the people, like Notre Dame, on your schedule like they do. 

Over at Northern Kentucky, we hit a real low ebb of our season.  Our shot selection, discipline and overall play was poor.  They deserved to win, as they have a fine program. We lost by 12, putting us on a two-game losing streak.
At that point, our season could have gone either way. We were digressing instead of improving and as the head coach I felt like there needed to be some drastic moves made.  Some eyes needed to be opened and the ballclub needed to be straightened out.

Straightening the Course
Coming home against Tennessee Wesleyan, I didn't feel like they could play inside with us and I told our team gear it in that direction.  Our shot selection had been bad, but I made our club take short shots.  I got a lot of criticism from our fans, but after we won, 78-76, I felt like that game was the turning point of our season. Getting the ball inside in that game started giving us a balance of scoring.  If we had continued to play trying to hit 30-foot jumpers, I don't think we could have won the national championship.

Playing that way proved a point. Even though we had excellent outside shooting in Golden and Gordon, getting the ball into Stich and Wright proved to make out as an even more effective move for our team's sake. Stich had the best night of his career that night, scoring about 24 points.

Next we went to Armstrong State, which was a key game for us. They had improved tremendously since we had played them the first time.  They have tremendous personnel and we had to struggle.  It was a big game in my career, being the 100^th coaching win at UTC, winning 79-70.  It was a tremendous win for us, because we had played down there the year before on television and had gotten ripped. 

Jacksonville State was fired up, but we won by 10 down there.  We got Western Carolina at our place and then got Tennessee State by 11 at our place in yet another exciting game.

We went down to Birmingham to play Samford in the new coliseum down there, which is a beautiful place to play.  We beat them by 20 there to close out the regular season. 

The Tournament
We got to host the Southern Regionals, and the field included Florida Tech, Valdosta State and Armstrong State. We were happy to get to host this. We opened against Valdosta State, which hadn't lost but about two games all year and managed to win by 16 in front of our home crowd. We got Florida Tech in the finals by 11, which gave us the regional championship. 

UTC traveled bout 3,000 miles to play the quarterfinal game and it would have been an impossible trip back had the results gone the other way. The University of North Dakota had won 48 games in a row at home and had knocked off Wisconsin-Green Bay, the country's top-ranked Division II team, in their regional and they were waiting for us. It was a classical matchup against two different types of basketball teams: they were patient, while as you know we aren't adverse to flying elsewhere at full speed. The team played a marvelous game, kept its poise and did what was necessary to win, winning by 24 under near-impossible circumstance.  And it all turned out to be so easy, with this game guaranteeing that, yes, we would indeed be going back to the national tournament. Our speed and running got them out of their game and they couldn't play our type game and we just pulled away at the end.

And Rocky Top! Finally, the National Tournament.
We didn't get a good draw in the national tournament, that being Sacred Heart, the favorite to become the first New England area team to play that well in a long time.  They had a tremendous record and great personnel.  We won by 14 points. 
I have to mention that one of the keys in the tournament this far had been the play of Herbert McCray.  He had been starting for us at Fred Rayhle's forward spot and had played great.

The finals, well, we whipped the Cinderella team, Randolph-Macon, 71-62, to get what we had been working for all year, the NCAA Division II National Championship. It is an incredible feeling to win a national championship.