Four years.
That’s how long Ray Hartsfield expected it would take to get his new program going in the right direction. But that was before destiny intervened.
A former Marine who had been primarily a football player in high school, he’d previously been a JV basketball coach at Riverside-Durham and a varsity head coach for two years at Forbush High in Yadkin County.
But he was ready to return to the Triangle, and in 1996 Hartsfield got the boys’ varsity basketball head coaching job at brand-new East Chapel Hill High School, which would compete in the 3A division despite starting its first year with only about 600 students, none of them seniors.
“The year was exciting, because it was a new school,” said Hartsfield, who recently finished his 22nd season at the helm of the program. “But there was a dread about it because of the idea of what happens to most new schools in athletics. So there were no expectations of what eventually happened.”
What eventually happened was one of the most remarkable stories in North Carolina high school basketball history, as the Wildcats shocked an entire state on their way to the 3A state championship game vs. Hickory High at the Dean E. Smith Center March 22, 1997, a game East won in a fashion that would have made an amazing story on its own, even without considering the challenges the Wildcats had faced along the way.
But those challenges were what Hartsfield had to deal with first.
“Being a new school, you would be amazed at how it’s just like a ghost town,” he said. “The walls were empty in the gym. We only had bleachers on one side of the gym. There were no banners.”
Some time during the summer of 1996, Hartsfield put an ad in a local newspaper to tell prospective East players to join him one night at Phillips Middle School for a meet-and-greet so he could organize some summer jamboree games. He was encouraged by what he saw that night.
“I told my assistant, ‘We might have something more than just some kids who want to try to play basketball,’” he said. “‘I think we’ve got some kids who love to play.’”
Hartsfield had no seniors, but he did get a core of four juniors who came over from Chapel Hill High: Andy Jones, Brad Woolley, Brian Fitzgerald and Paul Kindem (the latter two representing the only Wildcats with any varsity experience entering the 1996-97 season).
“Those four kids were the key because they played a lot of AAU ball together,” Hartsfield said. “I loved their skill set, but as much as anything, I loved the fact that they gave great leadership. Whatever we asked them to do, they were out front. When we were in conditioning, you know, Brian, he could not come in second. And he pulled kids with him: ‘Come on, we gonna work, we gonna work, we gonna get in shape!’”
Conditioning was crucial for a team that was almost exclusively reliant on the aforementioned four juniors, plus freshmen Chris Hobbs and Eric Henderson. Hartsfield lauded the efforts of his other reserves that season in bringing intensity to practices, but kept his bench very short because his top six players were so solid.
“We had six players, which is rare in high school,” Hartsfield said. “Six kids—who, I look at those six kids, and I say these kids at some level are college-bound athletes. So that was a realization I came to, how far we could get, I didn’t know. But that’s what we started with. We had six kids on the varsity team that were capable of playing college ball.”
(They ultimately did, as Fitzgerald played at UNC-Greensboro, Kindem and Woolley at Guilford College, Jones at Longwood, Henderson on UNC’s JV team, and Hobbs at Clemson—where he ranks 15th all time in career rebounds). Still, Hartsfield remained realistic about the season ahead.
“We felt like if we could make the state playoffs and have maybe a .500 season, that this was a successful group that just started the program. [Those were] my initial expectations.”
The regular season began with a close loss to 4A juggernaut Hillside High.
“It wasn’t over until it was over,” Hartsfield said. “The Hillside varsity coach came up to me after. He said, ‘Those kids never played varsity ball before? You played amazing!’ He said, ‘That was special, the way they executed and the way they got after it.’”
The next game, against Chapel Hill High (where Fitzgerald, Kindem, Jones and Woolley had all gone to school the previous year), yielded East’s first win in program history and got the Wildcats’ season on track, heading into a matchup with Southern Vance—the top-ranked 3A team in the state. East pulled out an impressive 67-57 victory.
“Now, they weren’t a surprise anymore,” Hartsfield said. “Everybody knew. But they did the work. They were very coachable. They didn’t try to reinvent the wheel. What we asked them to do, they did it and they did it with a fervor. And the best part was how to demand that each other do it, ‘Let’s do what coach says.’”
The Wildcats began to rattle off wins, ultimately clinching the regular-season title of the 3A Crescent Conference (after a memorable six-overtime 56-53 win over Northern Vance in which the first five overtimes were a scoreless stalemate) and finishing the season with a record of 18-4 (10-0 conference). East lost to Southern Vance in the conference tournament (the Wildcats’ only loss all season to a 3A opponent), but got back on track with wins over Hertford County, Beddingfield, and Ragsdale to begin the playoffs.
“Man for man, we matched up with anybody,” Hartsfield said. “Our zone defense, they really embraced it, and they were always connected.”
The zone was dominant in a convincing win over Jacksonville White Oak in the Regional Championship game, sending the Wildcats to the Dean E. Smith Center to face Hickory.
The Red Tornadoes were led by future UNC forward Will Johnson, along with point guard Daniel Willis, who would go on to become Lenoir-Rhyne’s all-time leading scorer (and later return to Hickory as a head coach).
“They were really talented,” Hartsfield said. “But when the war started, it was back and forth. It was pretty much a one possession game for 32 minutes.”
Willis hit big threes down the stretch, but crucially missed the front end of a one-and-one twice in the game’s final minute, allowing Hartsfield to call timeout with the Wildcats trailing 59-57 with 8.8 seconds to play.
Hartsfield hoped to get the ball to Fitzgerald, the team’s leading scorer, and wanted someone to shoot with enough time for an offensive rebound and putback in the event of a miss. Jones brought the ball up the court, guarded by Willis.
“I told Andy coming out, ‘Just make sure we get a shot,’” Hartsfield said. “[Hickory] just decided to hug everybody, so that gave Andy no place to pass the ball. He started to reverse the flow. He pushed this way, then he pushed back and pushed in towards the three point line.”
Jones, standing at just 5-foot-10, launched a deep pull-up three from the left wing over the 6-foot-3 Willis.
“I think [Willis] being so tall made Andy get the correct arc on the ball,” Hartsfield said. “One of the hardest things to do is to flip the nets. You shoot it so pure that the ball goes through the net and the nets come straight up to the top. Well, he flipped the nets. All of a sudden we were in a press conference talking about winning the state championship. I looked up at the sky and I said, ‘Unbelievable.’”
Hartsfield met with Hickory coach John Worley in the handshake line after the game.
“I said, ‘John, that was a great high school game,’” Hartsfield said. “He agreed, he said, ‘Somebody had to win, somebody had to lose, but your kid made a shot for the ages.’ [Andy]’s got that forever.”
When Hartsfield attended Jones’ wedding many years later, the shot came up again.
“At his bachelor party he showed them the shot, because a lot of people have heard about the shot,” Hartsfield said. “He said, ‘I showed them last night, Coach, but they still think I made it up.’”
The Wildcats lost in the regional championship game the next season, falling just short of a return trip to the Smith Center. But Hartsfield’s goal of building the program was certainly accomplished, as the Wildcats had won four straight conference titles by the time Henderson and Hobbs graduated.
On his right hand, Hartsfield still wears his championship ring, engraved with “ECHHS 3A STATE CHAMPS 1997” and the team’s motto “NOTHING BEATS HARD WORK.”
Hartsfield wears the ring almost all the time, only taking it off along with his wedding ring when doing a demonstration during practice.
“It’s old and crusty, it used to be nice and shiny, but it gives the kids something to strive for,” he said. “They see that big picture on the wall [by the gym], and they want to make their own picture.”
That picture on the wall near the gym immortalizes Hartsfield’s first Wildcat team, posing on what’s now Roy Williams Court before that fateful game March 22, 1997.
“It was a fun time,” Hartsfield said. “It was a fun year. Those kids did all the work. I was pretty much along for the ride.”
Hartsfield compares his 1996-97 team to a movie, but surprisingly not the seemingly-similar “Hoosiers” (even though a Hickory High also plays an important role in that film). Instead, he draws a parallel to a George Clooney movie about death on a fishing boat in the Atlantic.
“It’s kind of a tragic movie actually,” Hartsfield said of “The Perfect Storm” (which actually came out in 2000, shortly after the Wildcats’ state championship run). “But when you run into the perfect storm, it doesn’t matter what kind of experience you have. Those kids that we had come to East Chapel Hill that year—Brian, Paul, Andy, Brad, Chris and Eric—they were just the perfect storm.”
Photos by Eloise Rich/The ECHO.
