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Chattanooga rebuilds around Tate Darner, adding size and 11 newcomers, but replacing Jordan Frison's scoring and playmaking will define its season.
Written By
Written By
Chattanooga won the NIT in 2025. A year later the Mocs went 13-19 and 7-11 in the Southern Conference, then lost their first tournament game to The Citadel, 88-85. Injuries wrecked the season. Five players missed most or all of it. The offense ran through one guard, Jordan Frison, and he is gone too.
The league's coaches picked Chattanooga fifth with 59 points, two ahead of Tennessee Tech. Tate Darner made the preseason all-conference team as a sophomore. He is one of six returners on a roster of 17. Dan Earl brought in 11 new players, and he built them tall.
Eleven players from last year's roster are gone. Together they scored 2,004 of Chattanooga's 2,454 points, about 82 percent. They also made 271 of the team's 338 threes and had 394 of its 488 assists.
Frison was the engine. The 6-foot guard averaged 16.4 points and led the team with 129 assists in 32 games. He shot 55.7 percent from the field and 45.5 percent from three. He scored 20 or more 10 times, including 33 against VMI on Feb. 28. He made third-team All-SoCon in his only season after coming from Division II Pittsburg State. He transferred to Wichita State.
Five seniors are done. Brennan Watkins averaged 10.2 points and made 68 threes at 45.6 percent. Teddy Washington Jr. averaged 9.0 points and led the team with 34 steals. Billy Smith averaged 8.4 points and made 64 threes. Jikari Johnson averaged 6.7 points off the bench. Makai Richards, a 6-foot-10 center, started 13 games and averaged 3.4 points. All five have graduated.
Four more transferred. Collin Mulholland, a 6-foot-11 redshirt sophomore, averaged 7.6 points in 23 games and went to Utah State. Sebastian Hartmann averaged 7.0 points and 5.0 rebounds in seven games before an injury. He transferred to Kansas City. Latif Diouf, a 6-foot-9 forward, was limited to five games by injury and transferred to Kent State. Parker Robison, who played 27 games, went to Division II Auburn Montgomery. Ryan Lopez, a walk-on who played seven games, is no longer on the roster.
That is the point guard, the team's top two three-point shooters, and the two centers who started the most games. Chattanooga had to rebuild nearly everything.
Darner is the centerpiece. The 6-foot-4 guard from Lakeland, Fla., started 18 of 30 games as a freshman and averaged 9.9 points. He also led the team with 4.4 rebounds a game. He shot 45.1 percent from the field and 37.9 percent from three. His 53 threes set the program's freshman record. He scored 16 with eight rebounds in the tournament loss to The Citadel.
Josh Bowman is the returning big. The 6-foot-9 sophomore averaged 3.2 points and 2.5 rebounds in 23 games and made eight starts. He led the team with 23 blocks, also a Chattanooga freshman record. He had four blocks against ETSU.
Sean Cusano, a 6-foot-9 senior, started four of six games before a knee injury on Nov. 30 ended his season. He has played 44 games in three years. Zach Bleshoy, a guard from Pope High School in Marietta, Ga., sat out last season with an injury. He averaged 28 points as a high school senior. Houston Holland, a walk-on, started four games and made 11 of his 22 threes. Liam Vitters missed the season with a knee injury.
The returners scored 450 points last season. Darner had 296 of them.
Earl added five transfers, five freshmen, and one walk-on. Ten of the 17 players on the roster are 6-foot-5 or taller, and five are 6-foot-9 or taller.
Yonatan Levy is the most experienced big. The 6-foot-10, 260-pound forward from Israel started 28 of 32 games at Pepperdine and averaged 5.2 points, 4.2 rebounds, and 1.7 assists. He had 15 points against Gonzaga. He started his college career at Green Bay and played two seasons for Hapoel Eilat in Israel before that.
Tre Powell is the scorer. The 6-foot guard averaged 19.4 points at Division II Goldey-Beacom and shot 41.5 percent from three and 82.8 percent from the line. He scored 20 or more 12 times and led Goldey-Beacom to its first NCAA Division II Tournament.
Anthony Swift is a 6-foot-7 forward from Nebraska-Kearney. He averaged 12.9 points and 6.9 rebounds, led the team in rebounds and blocks, and shot 41.8 percent from three. Matt Hampton was a junior college All-American at Three Rivers College in Missouri. He averaged 16.9 points, 5.5 rebounds, and 5.3 assists.
Tyler Houser is the name with an asterisk. The 6-foot-9 forward averaged 14.2 points and 5.4 rebounds at Delaware and made 38 percent of his threes. He started his career at VMI. A knee injury is expected to keep him out for all of 2026-27.
The freshmen are older than the label suggests. Yssam Moungalla, a 6-foot-6 guard from Paris, averaged 15.9 points for AS Monaco's under-21 team and shot 45.7 percent from three. Lenny Anigbata, a 6-foot-7 wing from Munich, has played 92 games in German leagues, including the top division. Kobe McDowell-White, a guard from Australia, averaged 15.2 points and 8.5 assists in the NBL1 North and was its youth player of the year. Christian Matos was a four-star point guard at Sunrise Christian who made 46 percent of his threes. John Fleeman is a 7-foot center from Missouri. Caleb Hardaway, a local walk-on from Boyd Buchanan, rounds it out.
The first job is replacing Frison. Powell and Hampton are the obvious candidates, and McDowell-White and Matos are the young options. Powell scores like Frison did in Division II. Hampton passes more. Neither has played a Division I game.
The second job is the glass. Chattanooga was outrebounded by 2.5 a game last season, and Darner, a guard, led the team in rebounding. Levy, Swift, Bowman, and Fleeman should fix that. Houser was supposed to be part of it too.
The third job is health. Earl had to use a walk-on guard in the frontcourt last season because so many players were hurt. This roster has more bodies, but Cusano and Vitters are both coming back from knee injuries, and Houser is already out.
The schedule opens with a measuring stick. Chattanooga plays at Louisville on Nov. 2 and at Penn State on Nov. 5. Penn State is Earl's school. He was a three-time captain there, a 1996 All-Big Ten pick, and part of teams that went 73-46 in his career. Covenant visits on Nov. 9. Then the Mocs play at Elon on Nov. 13 and at Winthrop on Nov. 18.
After that come seven straight nonconference home games: Radford, Delaware State, Troy, Alabama A&M, Brescia, Point, and South Carolina State. League play opens at McKenzie Arena against Mercer on Dec. 19 and Samford on Dec. 22.
The league slate has 20 games now that Tennessee Tech has joined. The Mocs play at Western Carolina on Dec. 30 and at The Citadel on Jan. 2. They play at ETSU on Jan. 21 and host the Bucs on Feb. 3. Wofford is on Jan. 16 in Spartanburg and Feb. 6 at home. The last two weeks are the hardest: at Furman on Feb. 10, at Samford on Feb. 18, at Mercer on Feb. 20, Furman at home on Feb. 24, and the finale at Tennessee Tech on Feb. 27.
Chattanooga is the hardest team in the top half to project. Only Darner and Bowman played real minutes last season. The rest of the rotation is new, and four of the most important newcomers come from Division II, junior college, or overseas.
Fifth is fair. The size is real, and the Mocs should not get pushed around the way they did last winter. But size does not run an offense. If Powell or Hampton can do what Frison did, Chattanooga can climb into the top four. If not, the Mocs will be a big team searching for a point guard in February.
