Shanara Hollinquest

When the brackets for the NCAA women's basketball tournament are released Monday, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga could win up playing anywhere from Duke's legendary Cameron Indoor Stadium to Tempe, Ariz.

The Lady Mocs (24-8) won their 13th Southern Conference tournament last week, their eighth under coach Wes Moore. Despite winning the SoCon regular-season and tournament titles, UTC is expected to be a 14 or 15 seed.

"There's no way of knowing -- nobody knows -- so I don't even worry about it," Moore said of where UTC might wind up in the field of 64.

While Moore might not be paying attention to the projections on ESPN.com and other Web sites, his players have been. Freshman forward Erin Helton said the Lady Mocs, who returned to practice Saturday after a short spring break, have seen and discussed the predictions.

Helton said she didn't really care what seed UTC was or where the team plays in the first round. However, when it comes to a first-round opponent, Helton said she'd "prefer not to play UConn -- anybody but UConn would be great."

Top-ranked Connecticut has won a women's-record 72 straight games and is the overwhelming favorite to cut down the nets at the Final Four in San Antonio.

The Lady Mocs won't need to worry about facing the Huskies in the first round because it's very unlikely that UTC will be a No. 16 seed, not with numerous automatic qualifiers in the field with very bad RPI rankings.

The Lady Mocs' is 73, and they don't have a win over a team with a better number. Meanwhile, six of their eight losses were to teams with RPIs of 88 or worse -- much, much worse in the cases of Western Carolina (272) and Elon (293).

That equates, in RPI terms, to no good wins and numerous bad losses. However, 11 conference champions will have an RPI worse than UTC's, including East Tennessee State (which beat UTC by 24 in the season opener) and Austin Peay.

While the RPI isn't everything when it comes to where teams wind up in the brackets, it is part of the equation. As of Saturday afternoon, ESPN's Charlie Creme had UTC as a 14 seed facing 3 seed Oklahoma on its home court in Norman.

The Web site CollegeRPI.com has the Lady Mocs as a 15 seed facing 2 seed Duke. SoCon player of the year Shanara Hollinquest said playing at any of the sites within a few hundred miles of Chattanooga would be fine with her.

"I'd like to travel, but then again I want to be closer to home so most of the fans can come," she said. "We always seem to play good in front of a big crowd, so hopefully we're closer to home."

The Lady Mocs will have a selection show viewing party Monday at the downtown Big River Grille. The party starts at 6 p.m. and ESPN's special will begin at 7.