In death of basketball coach Eddie Payne, the Carolinas lose an institution
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified two different people named Bill Foster as the same person. One Bill Foster coached at South Carolina and a different Bill Foster coached at Clemson.
The Carolinas have lost a college basketball institution.
Eddie Payne, the former head coach of East Carolina University, Belmont Abbey, Greensboro College and, most recently, USC Upstate, died Wednesday morning from complications related to a stroke.
He was 69, days away from his 70th birthday.
Payne’s coaching career spanned five decades, from his start in 1976 as an assistant under Bill Foster at Clemson, to his 15-year stint at the helm of the USC Upstate Spartans. He retired from coaching the Spartans in 2017, citing difficulties from two ankle replacement surgeries.
Payne was born in Charlotte on July 10, 1951. He played high school basketball at East Mecklenburg and then college ball at Wake Forest, graduating in 1973. He got his master’s degree while he was an assistant coach at Clemson, but his first NCAA head coaching job came when he took the reins at Belmont Abbey College west of Charlotte in 1981. Over five seasons, Payne led the Crusaders to a 103-51 record.
In 1986, Payne accepted an assistant coaching job at South Carolina under George Felton, who had just replaced another Bill Foster, famed for leading Duke to the 1978 NCAA Tournament Final. Payne remained in Columbia until 1991 when he became the head coach of the ECU Pirates.
It was with East Carolina that Payne saw his greatest success, winning the 1993 CAA Tournament and qualifying for the NCAA Tournament — the only time he did so in his career, and only the second time the Pirates had ever done it. They were defeated in the first round by Dean Smith’s UNC Tar Heels, 85-65, and it is the last time ECU has been in March Madness.
He left the Pirates after four seasons, moving across the country to take the head job at Oregon State University, where he coached from 1995-2000. After five seasons and a 52-88 record as a Beaver, Payne came back to the Carolinas — first as the head coach of Greensboro College for two years, before his decade-and-a-half stint at USC Upstate in Spartanburg.
While at USC Upstate, he saw even more success, winning the Peach Belt regular-season championship in 2005 and the conference tournament in 2006. In 2012, he won the Hugh Durham Award, given annually to the best mid-major coach in NCAA Division I.
While a Spartan, he was able to coach NBA talents like Torrey Craig of the Phoenix Suns and his own son, Luke, who later served as an assistant alongside him. In the wake of his retirement in 2017, the Spartans renamed their basketball arena for him and his wife — the Eddie and Ann Payne Arena.
Ann, who survives Payne, was also a college basketball coach, leading the Charlotte 49ers women’s team from 1982 to 1984. When Payne took the job at Greensboro College in 2000, Ann took charge of the women’s team, coaching there until her husband left for USC Upstate two years later.
In addition to his wife and son, Payne is survived by a daughter-in-law, Amanda; a grandson, Hudson Gray; and brothers David and Steve and their families. Memorial services will be held at First Baptist Church Spartanburg in Spartanburg, S.C. on Sunday.
This story was originally published July 9, 2021 at 12:02 PM.