‘The GOAT coach’: Myers Park girls’ basketball coach Barbara Nelson is best of the era

Two years ago, in early January, Myers Park’s girls basketball team was off to a rather surprising 12-5 start. Star guard Mia Xerras, now a freshman at Connecticut College, came on The Charlotte Observer’s streaming high school sports show, “Talking Preps,” to discuss about how the Mustangs did it.

Xerras said the answer was simple: head coach Barbara Nelson.

“She’s really the ‘GOAT’ coach,” Xerras, then a high school junior, said with a big smile. “I love her...Everyone on the team does, too. I mean, she’s just awesome. Going to practice every day is a great time. We just all hang out on the court and off the court. It’s like a big family structure.”

Nelson has built similar relationships, like with the one she shares with Xerras, with hundreds of players during her 38-year career. And there’s something else she’s done, too.

Nelson, now 60, has won. And she’s won big.

“You’re only as good as the weakest person you put around you,” said Nelson, who has won nearly 800 games and nine state championships in 38 years, winning at nearly a 73% clip. “I’ve been pretty particular. I don’t hang onto bad kids. I try to work through bad parents. If you’re a problem parent and we have a meeting or two and can’t work through it, you’re probably going to need to go play for somebody else. Being around good people opens the door for growth for everybody. I think I need that.”

This week, The Observer is celebrating the 40th anniversary of its Sweet 16 high school basketball poll by honoring the top girls’ players, coaches, teams and performances of the era. The boys will come out next week.

A six-member panel made all the selections, and all of the choices included heavy debate — except one.

Nelson and her 791-298 record was the only unanimous choice.

But here’s the thing:

The greatest girls’ high school sports coach in Charlotte history almost had her career cut short.

From Clinton, S.C., to Charlotte

Nelson, then Barbara Frady, grew up in Clinton, S.C., and went to private Thornwell School. When she started high school, she said the local public school didn’t offer sports for girls. Nelson graduated in 1981 and eventually played point guard at Presbyterian College, where she met her future husband, Vernon Nelson.

“I wasn’t a scorer at all,” Barbara Nelson said. “I could make a layup and a free throw.”

After college, she was working at N.C. National Bank, which eventually became Bank of America, when she got her first high school job at Providence Day, in 1985. Nelson coached the junior high, then seventh through ninth grade, and was an assistant under Angie Siefert, who would later coach a three-time Parade All-American named Tiffani Johnson and build a powerhouse at Garinger High in the early 1990s.

“When I moved to Charlotte, I knew I loved sports,” Nelson said, “and when I started out in psychology (her undergrad major), I wanted to work with children. I always felt like kids were unprotected and needed people to look out for them. I wanted to protect them.”

Nelson started working college camps, for extra money and to learn more about the game she loved. She went to Tennessee, to Pat Summit’s women’s camp; to Clemson, to Cliff Ellis’ men’s camp; to North Carolina’s women’s camp with coach Sylvia Hatchell.

“That was long before AAU got huge,” Nelson said. “Camps were huge. They would have 300 kids and hire a bunch of people and you could work all summer. I remember working at Cliff Ellis’ camp at Clemson and that’s where I got the bug, and I figured out I really liked the teaching part of coaching, and I could still be around kids.”

Her first head coaching job opens up

Providence Day was 0-26 in the 1985-86 season, Nelson’s first as an assistant. The Chargers had a team of 12 players, she said, and six juniors quit during the year. Providence Day finished with three freshman and three seniors. The school decided to find a new head coach and Nelson, just one year into her career, started looking around.

She applied for a job at Charlotte Christian. She figured she couldn’t get the job at Providence Day. She lacked experience.

“The story would’ve been a little different,” Nelson said with a laugh. “But (a parent) whose two daughters had been on varsity went to bat for me and said the program needed to be rebuilt.”

In 1986-87, Nelson’s first year on varsity, Providence Day was 7-20. The six players who had quit as juniors wanted to come back as seniors. Nelson got permission from her athletic director to say no.

“I didn’t want to keep quitters,” she said. “I had no seniors my first year. They had quit on (Seifert) and made her life so miserable. I knew we were rebuilding and we just didn’t need that energy.”

But losing was hard. Nelson said the parents were happy, but she hadn’t been on too many teams that had lost as many games in a season as Providence Day had won.

That just made her work harder.

And guess what happened? Nelson’s teams have had two losing seasons since.

Nelson’s third team at Providence Day was 14-13, then 20-7 and, in the 1989-90 season, she led the Chargers to a 27-1 record and the school’s first girls’ basketball state championship. In mid-season, Providence Day added West Meck transfer Konecka Drakeford, who would score a N.C. private school record 3,118 points in the equivalent of about 21/2 seasons. She sat out nearly half of her freshman year and missed her junior year with a knee injury.

And the best girls’ basketball player and the best girls’ basketball coach in Charlotte history kicked off one of the most dominant runs in Mecklenburg County history.

Providence Day won seven state championships from 1990 to 2007. And then, Nelson decided she was ready for a new challenge. Her final team at Providence Day, in the 2006-07 season, lost to a N.C. opponent for the first time in three years. But the Chargers, who were ranked as high as No. 3 in the nation during the season, eventually won a third straight state championship.

One week after collecting The Observer’s regional coach of the year award in April 2007, Nelson took a job at NCAA Division II power Wingate.

“I just needed a different challenge,” she said. “Providence Day is a wonderful place and I had a great career there, and they supported me when I was making my early coaching mistakes and gave me a great place to grow up. But I reached a point where I felt I was not needed anymore. I like to be needed. Not so much wanted as needed. Going to Wingate was a new challenge. I just didn’t know how much of a challenge it was.”

At Wingate, NCAA and USA Basketball success

Nelson, then 44, told The Observer in the spring of 2007 that she knew coaching at the NCAA Division I level was not for her when interviewed for an assistant job at Charlotte. There was too much time on the road recruiting, too much time spent away from family, and Nelson and husband Vernon, by then, had two kids — 8-year-old Haley and 11-year-old Quinn.

Nelson’s ties to the area and her success, however, attracted Wingate athletic director Steve Poston, who eventually hired her to replace Johnny Jacumin, who had coached at the school for 27 years and won more than 600 games.

In Nelson’s rookie season, she took over a Wingate team that had lost its top three scorers from a 23-7 team, but returned two-time all-conference point guard Anna Atkinson.

“The year before they had five seniors playing all the time,” Nelson said of Jacumin’s last team. “We returned Atkinson and she averaged 36 minutes. The next two top players back averaged two (minutes). We were picked to finish eight or ninth and the kids were pretty offended. I walked into practice and (one of the players said), ‘Coach can you believe they picked us eighth? Do they know I’ve never been last at anything in my life?’”

Wingate finished 26-8 in Nelson’s rookie year and made the third NCAA Tournament Elite Eight appearance in school history. In five years, Nelson’s teams never had a losing record and never won fewer than 14 games. She was 101-51 overall with three NCAA Tournament appearances. She was the 2008 South Atlantic Conference coach of the year.

In 2009 and 2010, Nelson coached USA Basketball’s U16 and U17 nationall teams to a FIBA Americas and a FIBA World Championship, going 18-1 overall.

In 2010, Nelson was named USA Basketball Developmental coach of the year.

So everything was good. Until it wasn’t.

Credit cards and a near-brush with career death

A few times, Nelson said she had Wingate players meet her at local gas station where she put $10 worth of gas in their cars, charging it to her credit card. That’s against NCAA rules. It led to her ouster after a player turned in an audio recording of Nelson discussing the transactions to Wingate’s compliance office.

“We didn’t have a track,” Nelson said, “and we had to go to Forest Hills (High) to do preseason conditioning. I gave the kids money to put gas in their car. Yes, that is illegal and I shouldn’t have done it and I suffered the consequences. I read the rule book and took the test and did not go ask the compliance officer.”

According to published reports, Nelson resigned from Wingate on May 4, 2012. She said an NCAA investigation took 13 months and she was not allowed to discuss the case.

The Observer put in calls and emails to Wingate but the school did not respond with a comment.

“I was very depressed for four or five weeks,” Nelson said. “I couldn’t talk about it and people were spreading rumors. And you can’t answer anything or say anything and Wingate couldn’t say anything. I worked so hard to be a good coach and a good person and it really took me truly believing that God had forgiven me to understand I didn’t need man’s forgiveness. I had His, and at that point, I needed to walk in His path and not worry about the human path.”

But Nelson did worry about one thing. She worried that she would never coach again.

“I cried a lot,” she said. “I still tear up thinking about it.”

Nelson said the NCAA investigation ended up with a “Show Cause” violation, an administrative punishment that would follow her for a set amount of time and could be transferred to any other NCAA-member school that would’ve hired her.

“I could’ve been hired by an NCAA school,” she said, “but I had to be monitored, like I couldn’t handle any money. “

Nelson said she never lied about what she did to investigators through multiple interviews, and admits to her role in everything.

“(I chose) to do this even though inside I knew what I did was wrong,” she said. “I had to turn over bank statements to Wingate, camp stuff. They looked through everything.”

Back to high school, a fresh start

Not long after news broke that Nelson had resigned from Wingate, then Myers Park athletic director Rick Lewis called her about a potential opening at Hough High School in Cornelius, which she interviewed for. Nelson also talked to the staff at Hopewell High, but during that time, the Myers Park job came open and Myers Park was minutes from her family’s home.

Lewis met Nelson when he was coaching boys’ basketball at Garinger High School and they bonded at Mike Krzyzewski’s camp in Durham one summer. Lewis knew about the Wingate situation. Some of the players he coached at Myers Park were at Wingate, and his son had played there, too. Lewis also lived not far from the Division II school in Union County.

“I knew some of what went on at Wingate,” said Lewis, now athletic director at Catawba Ridge High in South Carolina. “But I knew Barb was a really good coach who had a really good heart. I knew she was a quality human being and she’s good for kids. I didn’t blink an eye. She was by far my best option. I jumped at the opportunity.”

Nelson’s first three teams at Myers Park were 88-3 and became the first back-to-back N.C. 4A state champion in Mecklenburg County history. It was the second time in her career that Nelson had led a school to its first-ever state title.

“My son came and coached with me,” Nelson said. “I had coached him in AAU and now I was getting to coach with him and that was pretty cool.”

In 12 seasons with the Mustangs, Nelson is 176-56 with six conference and three conference tournament championships. She’s been named conference coach of the year in six of her 12 seasons.

“She motivates those girls,” Lewis said, “and she’s got the ‘It’ factor. She works so hard and she’s so committed. She starts every year with a new motto and mantra and she pushes and pushes and pushes. And she’s one of the best X and O coaches I’ve ever been around. She just has a phenomenal basketball mind.”

An unmatched legacy that keeps growing

Nelson turns 61 this month. She jokes that “this will be the 31st anniversary of my 30th birthday.” But she doesn’t have any plans to stop.

And current Myers Park athletic director Brian Poole said Nelson is as good as ever, noting how she took last season’s team, not expected to do much, to a NCHSAA 4A Western Regional semifinal playoff berth and a 27-3 overall record.

“She doesn’t change a whole lot of who she is,” Poore said. “In my mind, this year was one of the best years of coaching she’s ever had. She knows the game so well. You want to play for someone that teaches you and cares for you and respects you, and that’s just a special thing. The parents love her. They buy into her. Now she’s old school. She’ll get raw, but she’s adapted well (with the younger generation).”

Whenever Nelson stops, it’ll be hard for another Mecklenburg County to top her ever-growing legacy:

▪ The Observer has been picked her as Mecklenburg County coach of the year a record seven times. She’s been The Observer’s regional coach of the year — the best in its entire coverage zone, including Mecklenburg County — four more times. That’s another record.

▪ Nelson’s teams have won nine state titles, five Sweet 16 poll championships and she’s got 690 high school wins. The wins rank third among all N.C. public or private school girls’ high school basketball coaches.

▪ And in 38 seasons, Nelson’s teams have won 32 championships of one variety or another.

“I can’t imagine who else you would pick (as the coach of the Sweet 16 era),” said Lewis, the former Myers Park athletic director. “Everywhere she’s been, she’s won. Making the jump from private school to go to college and now she’s using that same method of what she’s been doing at Myers Park. She’s found the formula and stuck to it and there’s never been a drop off.

“There just really hasn’t been.”