Springtime success: With 4 NCAA tourney berths, Charlotte 49er athletics in full bloom
Maybe you haven’t noticed, but there’s something good in the sports world happening in north Charlotte.
The Charlotte 49ers are quietly building an athletic dynamo — not a powerhouse yet, but a program whose arrow is pointed up.
Headlined by the baseball team’s first NCAA tournament appearance since 2011 and highest postseason seeding ever, the 49ers have had what is arguably the most successful spring season in their sports history. They have placed a school-record four teams into their respective NCAA tournaments this season: longtime standouts men’s soccer and men’s golf made the field, as well as baseball, while men’s cross country received its first-ever bid.
It has been a sports year like no other due to COVID-19, with many fall schedules compressed and/or moved into the spring. “On any given day, it felt like we had 100 events going on at the same time,” Charlotte athletic director Mike Hill said.
But the 49ers emerged from that chaos with a slew of teams who either won their conference title or barely missed winning it, propelled in part by a new generation of head coaches who have added a fresh dose of enthusiasm to the successful veterans who remain.
Of the 49ers’ 13 head coaches in various sports, Hill has hired seven of them in his three years as athletic director. Frequently, although not always, he has hired young coaches who were top assistants at high-profile schools. His next problem may be holding onto some of those coaches if they continue winning — football coach Will Healy has already been the subject of many “will-he-leave” rumors — although Hill doesn’t mind that.
“If people aren’t coveting our coaches,” Hill said, “we probably have an issue.”
49ers coaches stick together in pandemic
Robert Woodard, the baseball coach, grew up in Charlotte and was a well-known assistant coach at UNC. His baseball team has been in the Top 20 in the national rankings for much of the season and is playing this weekend in the NCAA Greenville regional, trying to advance to the national round of 16.
“There’s some serious momentum here in Charlotte,” said Woodard, who was hired by Hill in 2019. “I felt it during my job interview, and I’ve felt it even more this past year.”
The 49ers’ head coaches began meeting via Zoom every Thursday at 1 p.m. during the COVID-19 pandemic, and they’ve continued those meetings even as the world has opened up and vaccinations have become common.
“I think the silver lining is we’ve gotten really close through all this,” Woodard said of himself and the other head coaches. “When everyone was isolating, we still saw each other (virtually). We talked about issues and things that have helped. I got a sense of what we might need to consider next, what was coming. We’ve all leaned on each other.”
Charlotte’s athletic programs didn’t all have a great year at the same time in 2020-21. In fact, the 49ers’ two highest-profile sports struggled.
One year after playing in a college bowl game for the first time ever, the football team went 2-4 in a season that seemed to get shorter by the week due to COVID-related postponements. The men’s basketball team was only 9-16, their sixth losing season in the past seven years for a program that earned a Final Four berth in 1977 but hasn’t made the NCAA tournament since 2005.
“I get that the casual fan judges success on football and men’s basketball,” Hill said, “and it’s important to us that those two programs succeed. But turn the clock back 12 months and both of them were riding high. I have every belief that they will resume that journey again.
“And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that football and basketball were the two sports that sort of started all of our athletic competitions and played right into the teeth of the pandemic. Football only got in half their games. Basketball had a (COVID-related) shutdown in October, which is when you’re preparing for the season, and also had all sorts of issues that they were dealing with throughout the course of the year as well.”
Charlotte teams turn a corner
Then came the spring, where Charlotte’s sports teams turned a corner. The school has had multiple Conference USA players of the year in 2021, including Bailey Vannoy in women’s softball, Austin Knight in baseball and Patrick Hogan in men’s soccer (defensive player of the year). Nick Scudder won numerous cross country and track titles. And golfer Matt Sharpstene, a junior, qualified for the U.S. Open later this month.
Women’s tennis didn’t win a conference championship, but it had its highest-ever national ranking (43rd). Its coach is Anthony Davison, a 31-year-old alum from England who played for the Charlotte men’s tennis team from 2008-2012.
“Back then there was no football stadium,” Davison said. “There was no light rail into the city of Charlotte — and believe me, I have taken a lot of recruits onto that light rail over the past few years. The facilities have improved so much overall, as has the campus. There are just so many new buildings now compared to what it looked like when I left.”
As a whole, the 49ers have had an average league finish of 3.53 this year, tops in Conference USA. They also led the conference with 333 athletes being named to the conference honor roll.
“We still have a lot of work to do,” Hill said. “But we’re on a trajectory right now that’s exciting.”
This story was originally published June 4, 2021 at 1:14 PM with the headline "Springtime success: With 4 NCAA tourney berths, Charlotte 49er athletics in full bloom."
