Last year, the UNC men’s and women’s basketball teams had more questions than answers in October. This year, both are seen as contenders for not just a conference championship, but a national championship as well.
Head coach Courtney Banghart is entering her fourth season leading the women’s program, and is poised to have a preseason top 25 ranking for the first time in her tenure. It’s easy to see why: the Tar Heels return four starters from last year’s 25-win team which advanced to the Sweet 16. One of those starters has effectively become the face of the program: junior guard Deja Kelly.
Kelly was named first team All-ACC as a sophomore and scored 23 points in UNC’s season-ending loss to eventual national champion South Carolina last March. Now that she and many of her teammates are entering their junior seasons, Kelly said she expects the Tar Heels to take the next step in 2023.
“We’ve been here before. We know what it takes to reach the goals that we want to reach,” Kelly said. “And knowing that we put in the work together over the summer in the offseason, and just knowing that we have that experience under our belt now and that we’re not babies anymore… that definitely will set us apart.”
Banghart was careful to emphasize the differences between last year’s team and this year’s. But the former National Coach of the Year winner also laid out her goals for how Carolina can both equal and surpass its success from 2022.
“My hope is that they find their connectedness in the same way they did last year, in their own unique way but with the same result,” Banghart said. “And then, that they stay committed to the journey. Because this is a really tough league. We’ve got NC State, Duke, Virginia, Virginia Tech twice, plus everyone else in the conference. So you just can’t get too up and too down. You’ve got to keep getting better.
“That’s gonna be my mission is to keep them focused on that,” she continued. “And that’s gonna be their job as experienced talent: to know that it matters that you’re playing your best basketball late. So just keep going.”
Head coach Courtney Banghart and guards Kennedy Todd-Williams and Deja Kelly at the ACC Tip-Off on Tuesday, October 11. (Image via UNC Women’s Basketball on Twitter)
On the men’s side, head coach Hubert Davis’ group is seen as a likely preseason No. 1. It would be Carolina’s first such ranking since the 2015-16 season. The projections are a stark difference from last season, when Davis’ team struggled early, quickly fell out of the top 25 and spent most of the year unranked. Now, Davis said he is instructing his team to keep doing what it did toward the end of last season: ignore the noise.
“The things that I have talked to the players and the team [about] a number of times daily,” Davis said, “is that there’s negative noise and that’s criticism, and there’s positive noise and that’s praise. Even though they come from different directions, they’re still noise. And [if we] focus on what is real, our preparation and our practice, at the end of the day we’ll be happy with the results.”
Junior guard Caleb Love is one of four starters who chose to return to Chapel Hill this season. Love has already secured his place in Carolina lore with clutch shots during the NCAA Tournament, and said the championship loss to Kansas is still firing up the team more than six months later.
“We want to write our own story,” Love said. “This is a new team, a new age. For us to go out this year and do what we’ve gotta do, knowing what happened last year, we’re more motivated than ever.”
Now that the ACC Tip-Off is over, it’ll be almost a month before the men’s and women’s teams begin their regular seasons. The women will host Jackson State on November 9 in their season-opener, while the men will host Johnson C. Smith in an exhibition on October 28 before facing UNC-Wilmington on November 7.
Both teams made headlines during last spring’s NCAA Tournaments, but both also ended their seasons with a loss. The goal for 2023 is simple: don’t let that happen again.
Featured image via Inside Carolina
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