Josh Banks ’ mother led a convoy down Interstate 26 toward Charlotte.
Three UNC Asheville men’s basketball players were in the back seat as Banks’ mother drove alongside his stepfather on a recent Saturday night. Fellow Charlotte natives Jordan Marsh and Kameron Taylor were driving cars behind Banks, among eight players who were heading to the Queen City.
Head coach Mike Morrell left the following day, taking four more Bulldogs players with him. He’d happened to be watching his mother’s dog — named Kobe — who came to Charlotte with the players as well. Basketball was the least of his worries.
The Bulldogs’ men’s and women’s basketball teams have been in Charlotte for roughly three weeks amid devastating flooding in Asheville from Hurricane Helene . They’ve been living in hotels in University City and practicing all over, from the Charlotte Hornets’ facilities in uptown to Johnson C. Smith to West Charlotte High School.
“All that we’ve been going through, we’re just very thankful and appreciative,” Banks, a fifth-year guard who rose to prominence during a standout career at Olympic High School, said Tuesday at Big South preseason media day in Charlotte. “We’re not victims. It’s just the situation that we’ve been in the past couple weeks, we’re just blessed and thankful that we still have a season coming up, and now we’re just locked in and focused.
“The past two weeks have been tough. It has been tough to see the place that we live and the place where we are most of the time in the condition that it’s in now.”
‘We still get up every day smiling’
This season, UNC Asheville women’s basketball is pushing to understand the applications of basketball into life.
New head coach Tynesha Lewis , who won North Carolina’s “Ms. Basketball” honors in 1996-97 at Southwest Edgecombe, enters her first season. She previously led Elizabeth City State University, the Division II school in eastern North Carolina, to three straight Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association championship games after playing at N.C. State and in the WNBA.
Just like her first season as a head coach — she started at Elizabeth City State in 2020 — she’s had to navigate uncharted waters. She’s made an effort to hold regular check-ins with her players, and mental health specialist Dr. Laura Jones has been meeting with them, as well.
The Bulldogs have been practicing at Johnson C. Smith in the morning, and then they use the Hornets’ facility in the evening to work on shooting. Queens University and the Charlotte 49ers have also hosted them when they can’t get inside J.C. Smith or Spectrum Center.
“The hurricane has shown us: If we show up every day, no matter how I’m feeling — I’m aching, I’m sore — and I look to the right and my left, everybody else is still pushing,” said Nycerra Minnis , a fifth-year forward from the Washington, D.C., area who started at University of Virginia. “We are really strong. It’s not even just the hurricane, the emotional aspect has came with it. Everything we’ve had to overcome thus far, and our season is less than 30 days away.
“And we still get up every day smiling. I feel like, ‘Wow.’ We are strong, and we can do anything we put our mind to. Because we’re doing it right now.”
UNC Asheville teams understand the bigger picture
Morrell, who enters his seventh season as men’s basketball head coach at UNC Asheville , has a diary.
There are “a lot more words in that thing” over the past few weeks, he said. He said if he ever ends up writing a book, these experiences will take up an entire chapter.
Janet Cone , the athletic director at UNC Asheville, has been integral, making a passionate effort to understand how the student-athletes are doing and ensure that the Bulldogs have places to play.
It might be “delayed gratification,” as Morrell put it, in terms of how the totality of this experience will really end up helping them in the long run. But he knows it’ll mean even more once they get a chance to return to practice inside Kimmel Arena .
“We ain’t victims here,” Morrell said. “I think too many times in these situations, it’s like what we’re going through. We’re inconvenienced. And we’ll be home, hopefully soon. When that time comes, hopefully, we’ll learn a lot from it.
“But you go back to Asheville. Walk around, go down the front — I live a half-mile from the River Arts District — you find out really quickly when you get to walk into your own door, that you ain’t no victim. There are people there going through a lot, lot more than we are.”
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