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Eighteen years, 15 losing seasons and zero state playoff appearances.
Before the 2023-24 season, that was the state of Woods Charter’s boys basketball program — a team stuck in the dark.
Leonard McNair went through it himself as a player from 2012-15. After Woods Charter hired him as the school’s next head coach in 2022, an 0-15 start to his first year looked as if the Wolves were falling deeper into its long history of disappointment.
But, what they couldn’t see was instead an ascent into the light.
One year later, Woods Charter would finish its best season in its history, blowing through its previous single-season wins record of seven. Although the Wolves didn’t achieve a winning record, as they finished the 2023-24 regular season 11-12, they reached the state playoffs for the first time, pioneering new standards for a program that hadn’t seen such success before.
“They just came out to work and were ready to go,” McNair said. “I just couldn’t be more proud of them. No blueprint, just playing hard.”
Knowing the turn around wouldn’t happen instantly, McNair turned off expectations for the Wolves in his first season as head coach and made it all about the grind. He just wanted the team to focus on its own improvement instead of letting the continued history of losing discourage his players.
Plus, the team still had to adapt to McNair’s coaching and gel under the new leadership, despite having an older squad made of mostly seniors and juniors.
From the outside, things weren’t looking good for the transitioning Wolves as they opened the 2022-23 season with 15 straight losses. But, even though the team couldn’t see an upwards progression in the wins column, it could definitely sense it.
“It was really like a rebuild,” senior Eli Hunter DeMarco said. “Getting used to that new style of coaching, (McNair’s) energy and passion built us up as a team, and obviously, we came in better (in 2023), but last year was really that fundamental switch.”
Said McNair, “Going 0-15, just as a human being, is demoralizing. And, I never saw it in anybody’s face. I could just tell they were happy to be putting in this work. They knew that the change was going to come.”
Woods Charter basketball changed for the better in February 2022. During that month, the Wolves won their first game of the season over Clover Garden School, 49-38, which was also the first of three victories in their remaining five games.
“When we got that first win, I just saw the pride and joy in their face,” McNair said. “And then for us to continue to do it and do it, I said, ‘Ok. We’ve got something here.’”
However, seeing that the team would get younger with a group of seniors leaving and a talented group of middle schoolers who had just won a conference championship coming in, the idea of low expectations carried over into the new year.
Some returning and incoming players had in their minds the ideas of finally breaking seven wins and possibly making the state playoffs, but McNair made sure they were blind to those visions until they became reality.
“I really like to teach and look at the big picture for them,” McNair said. “I never want to put too many goals on them. We’re just going to go out and play hard. I think organically those types of things can happen. You just keep putting in work day by day, and eventually, you’re going to get the results that you want.”
With open gyms, a camp at N.C. State and team and individual drilling, the Wolves went all gas during the offseason prior to their 2023-24 campaign. Even the young guys, led by freshman Levi Haygood, were already building chemistry with the team from months’ worth of preparation.
And, although they couldn’t fathom hearing McNair say it, it was no longer a secret — especially to the older guys like Hunter DeMarco who hadn’t seen much success in their careers — that history could be made.
“The first couple of practices (and) seeing the new team, seeing how the new guys came in, all the talent from the freshmen, I really began to see that we have the talent to do it,” Hunter DeMarco said. “We can break this win record, we can go to the playoffs (and) we can win.”
Due to some early misfortune, though, the 2023-24 season began to look gloomily familiar. The Wolves lost senior Caden Watson, their only all-conference player from the previous winter, for the year to a torn rotator cuff two games into the season. Hunter DeMarco started to develop lingering back pain, and the team repeatedly dealt with sicknesses as it struggled to a 1-5 start.
Yet, after beating River Mill in a close, 33-32 battle on Dec. 11, Woods Charter began to pick up some steam, winning five of its next eight games.
Before playing Ascend Leadership on Jan. 29, McNair hadn’t even mentioned to his six-win team that another win would make history. For many of the players, the 55-30 triumph over the Aviators felt like an ordinary victory until they got to the locker room.
“I didn’t even know that was going to be the game,” Haygood said. “He let us know after that that was the win. It was a good win, too. And, we weren’t even close to the end of the season yet, so we had a lot left to go.”
Woods Charter continued to smash the record for the rest of the season while simultaneously, yet subconsciously, chasing another historic milestone. Winning three of their last seven regular season games, the Wolves ended the year with an 8-4 conference record and a third place finish in the Central Tar Heel 1A, giving them a bid in the 1A state playoffs.
“I tried to shield it from them because I was kind of looking for a while, and I knew we were probably going to make it,” McNair said. “Maxwell Carr got the gist, and he spread it through the locker room, but they stayed focused, so I was proud.”
After a second-round exit in the conference tournament, Woods Charter was named a 28 seed in the 1A East bracket, pairing them against an in-county, and very good, opponent in Chatham Central.
Although just miles apart, Woods Charter and Chatham Central were unfamiliar foes leading into their first round matchup on Feb. 27, having not played each other since 2019. The Wolves gave the Bears all they could handle in the beginning, trailing only 19-16 at the end of the first quarter with the help of numerous buckets and offensive rebounds from Hunter DeMarco. However, Chatham Central regained control of the boards and created turnovers out of the press to pull away for an 87-36 victory.
For Hunter DeMarco and the rest of Woods Charter’s senior class, their final game won’t be lost in the dark years like the classes before them, and for the underclassmen, there’s now a clear standard to uphold.
Impressed by how they handled the new pressures of winning and playing in the playoffs, McNair even said that in the following years, he’ll likely hold back less with telling his team about the reality of the moment. And, with a young group that has up to three seasons to build off this past winter, Haygood feels like this is only the beginning.
“I’m very confident, like (let’s) break this record again,” Haygood said. “Get higher seeds, get to the second (and) third round of the playoffs, like as far as we can. I think we can definitely get that. And even with Paul, Alden, Charlie, those guys will improve so much over the seasons, even me…We’re going to be so much better next year.”
