Pop quiz: Which college basketball team has the best record in the state of North Carolina?
It’s not Duke or Carolina. At 11-3, those blue bloods are both a game and a half out of the lead, as are the other ACC big guys — State and Wake.
UNC Greensboro is always good, but the Spartans are 11-4, two games back … and in the same conference with the state’s best team, record-wise, so far this season.
A little over a week into January, the best record in North Carolina belongs to the Catamounts of Western Carolina.
“We’re 13-2,” said head coach Justin Gray. “You tell me the last time you had a team in Western Carolina that was 13-2.”
That would be the 1958-59 season, when Western Carolina jumped out to a 15-1 record and finished 24-4. The Catamounts were an NAIA team then, decades away from the move to Division I.
If their coach’s name sounds familiar, that’s because Gray has made a basketball tour of the state over his career. Born in Raleigh and raised in Charlotte, he started his playing career at West Charlotte High. After a detour to Oak Hill Academy, he returned to North Carolina to play four years for Wake Forest. Gray was a teammate of Chris Paul and a three-time All-ACC player. He still ranks No. 8 on the school’s scoring list.
That’s when his basketball journey expanded to a global enterprise. He never played in the NBA, but from 2006 to 2018, he played for 17 teams in 13 different foreign countries. After hanging up his basketball shoes, he spent a year at Wake Forest as director of basketball development. After two years as an assistant to Pat Kelsey at Winthrop, he was hired by Western in 2021.
“My mom and dad raised me the right way,” he said after being hired. “Put your head down. Work hard.”
He also gave the players, still living under COVID guidelines, March Madness facemasks and declared that making the NCAA Tournament was their goal. He promised the team, “I will coach you hard, but I will love you harder.”
The hard work and tough love have paid off. The Catamounts have steadily improved under Gray, from 11-21 in his first season to 18-16 last year before this season’s hot start. They won their first six games, the team’s best unbeaten start since 1966. Entering this week, the Catamounts were riding a seven-game winning streak, Western Carolina’s longest since 2012 and the eighth-longest in school history.
“They’re not gonna play perfect,” he said at the start of this season, “but they’re gonna play hard. If you’re gonna get into the game and wear purple, you’re gonna play hard.”
They’re also playing well. Senior Vonterius Woolbright leads the team in scoring and rebounding, averaging a double-double of 21.1 points and 12.4 rebounds. He’s also the team’s top assists man and has won five of the Southern Conference’s nine player of the week awards so far this season, tying a team single-season record with two months still to play. Other key contributors include shooter Tre Jackson, in his second year with Western after transferring from Iowa State (13.3 points per game), sophomore guard DJ Campbell (12.5) and Russell Jones Jr., who transferred from Winthrop to reunite with his former assistant coach (10.9).
Despite having four double-figure scorers, this is a blue-collar team built in the image of their former journeyman coach. They take care of the ball, play stiff defense on the interior and crash the boards.
“Sometimes, we try to play the offensive side of the ball,” he said. “If the ball goes in (you say), ‘Yes!’ No no no. We defend. And when we defend, then we go out and score.”
Gray and the Catamounts also welcome adversity. When Western faced back-to-back road games near the start of conference play, he said, “Ain’t no way to do it but rip the Band-Aid off, and let’s go at it.”
In addition to the normal analytics used to evaluate a basketball team, Gray tries to measure what he calls the team’s R.
“We had a really, really good R,” he said after beating Wofford.
“We challenge them on it all the time,” he clarified. “Good R — good response. We call it R.”
The team still likely needs to win the Southern Conference’s automatic bid to make the tournament and achieve the goal Gray set at his introductory press conference, but the team has established itself as one of the squads to beat.
“Are they perfect right now,” he asked rhetorically. “Perfect? They’re not there, but they’re ending on excellent.”
For now, that’s enough to give them the best record in the state, and fans are starting to notice.
“Everybody loves a winner,” Gray said. “I’m a Carolina Panthers fan. I had a chance to go to a game over the break. You know what I did? I sold my tickets.”
