ASHEVILLE — Finishing the regular season with two straight losses was not how UNC Asheville men’s basketball coach Mike Morrell wanted his team to enter the Big South Tournament, but there is no denying his Bulldogs know how to handle adversity.
UNCA begins the postseason with a 20-10 record, including an 11-5 record in the Big South that earned the team the second seed behind in-state rival High Point. But the Bulldogs’ path to March Madness isn’t told in their record alone.
“I can walk probably 150, 200 yards and see the French Broad,” Morrell said of the river that runs through picturesque Asheville. “I just have to go right over the crest of my hill.”
From there, Morrell watched the unimaginable unfold. Hurricane Helene dumped nearly 14 inches of rain over three days in late September, and Morrell had a front-row seat to the storm that would terrorize the city and many others in Helene’s path.
“So I sat there and watched the whole thing, man,” he said. “The wind and the rain — the storm, kind of pushed through around the late morning, mid-morning that Friday. And so I walked down to the river, and kind of went across the bridge that I take home every day. I was probably there with 50, 75 people on that bridge. That was probably around 12 or 1. … That bridge wasn’t there at 4.”
Morrell’s home was spared, but much of the River Arts District where he lives along the French Broad was washed away or flooded. Power, water and cell service were all wiped out throughout the region.
“That was unlike anything I’d ever experienced,” Morrell said. “It also like — I kind of really don’t know what the right word is, but it was kind of like, ‘I don’t really give a s–t about basketball right now.’”
Morrell and the Bulldogs relocated to Charlotte, moving into hotels while the campus — which was without basic utilities and suffered some damage due to flooding and fallen trees, though nothing like what was seen elsewhere — shut down.
“That three-day stretch, I ain’t never been through nothing like that,” Morrell said. “I mean, it was just complete and utter chaos. Unbelievable.”
Morrell still had to prepare his team for the season, one without two-time Big South Player of the Year Drew Pember, who graduated after leading UNCA to the NCAA Tournament in 2023 and a conference title game appearance last year.
“I knew we were going to be different. I knew we weren’t going to go find another Pember,” said Morrell, who called the 6-foot-11 Tennessee transfer perhaps the best player in Big South history.
Still, Morrell was confident his top returning players — starters Josh Banks and Fletcher Abee, and key reserves Greg Gantt and Toyaz Solomon — along with transfers Justin Wright and Jordan Marsh and incoming freshman Kameron Taylor gave him a foundation on which to build.
The Bulldogs played a scrimmage against Furman, losing Wright to a season-ending injury but otherwise performing well despite having only about eight practices due to the storm and its aftermath.
Then the team got on the bus and realized it wasn’t heading back to campus but to its Charlotte hotel.
“So there was just this emotion, these huge waves of emotion,” Morrell said.
The Bulldogs, having reworked their scheduling due to the storm and losing two early-season games in Asheville, started their regular season with seven road games. They went 3-4 after starting with a loss at second-ranked Alabama on Nov. 4 and finishing with a 22-point loss at George Mason on Dec. 3.
“We did not play great, and I didn’t care,” Morrell said of the road trip-ending loss to the Atlantic 10’s Patriots. “I was so done. Our team was so done. We were so ready to get back home. I told that bus driver, ‘You can’t get this thing back to Asheville fast enough.’
“And we took the next day off. And after that day off, we had practice, and it was like new coach, new staff, new team, completely different vibe from being gone for two months.”
The Bulldogs returned to UNCA’s campus — which had power restored but was still without drinking water — and won their home opener against NAIA St. Andrews. They then won four more at Kimmel Arena before a road loss to UNC Wilmington. UNCA ended the calendar year with a win over visiting Virginia-Lynchburg and opened 2025 with a 103-99 win at home over High Point, the top team in the Big South.
“That was exactly what we needed,” Morrell said of playing seven of eight at home. “It really was.”
Marsh, the sophomore transfer from App State, leads the Bulldogs with 19.2 points per game, while Solomon has emerged after Pember’s departure with 15.5 points and 7.2 rebounds. Banks also averages over 15 points, and Abee is a double-digit scorer who shoots nearly 43% from 3-point range.
Even with many familiar faces, it’s a different look from the team that relied on Pember as its do-everything star in recent seasons. UNCA, despite everything, still finds itself near the top of the Big South and continues to be one of the nation’s best home teams.
The Bulldogs entered last Wednesday’s game with a 13-0 record at home before a 1-for-22 night from 3-point range contributed to a loss to Presbyterian. UNCA followed that with a regular season-ending road loss at Winthrop.
The Bulldogs will head about an hour north for the Big South Conference Tournament in Johnson City, Tennessee — about eight miles from Morrell’s hometown of Elizabethton — as the No. 2 seed. UNCA opens Friday night against Charleston Southern — a team it swept in the regular season — and with a win would then face either third-seeded Winthrop or sixth-seeded Longwood on Saturday for a chance to return to the championship game for a third straight year.
Morrell and his players entered the season wondering how they would move on without their star player and now approach its end having gone through so much more. This week gives them a chance to write another chapter.
“We’ve got some guys up there with experience who have won in that setting, but everybody’s playing for their life in that thing,” Morrell said. “And that’s one of the things about March Madness that makes it so beautiful.
“You’ve got to go try to play as free as you possibly can.”
