Charlotte 49ers men’s basketball: 5 things to know as important season begins
Ask Charlotte 49ers head coach Ron Sanchez what it would take to make the NCAA tournament this season — the kind of question coaches tend to scoff at before reeling off a platitude about playing “one day at a time” or “falling in love with the process” — and he’d respond with one word.
Three syllables, really.
“February.”
“We can be the best in November, December,” Sanchez told The Charlotte Observer before a practice last week. “But if we’re not the best version of ourselves in February, it won’t matter. We have to be the best version of ourselves leading into the last weekend of conference play.”
The 49ers host Coppin State in Halton Arena at 6 p.m. on Monday, marking the beginning of the 2022-23 season for Charlotte basketball and the first show of what this team, come February, could be.
Here are five things to know about Charlotte 49ers men’s basketball team in 2022-23.
1. A pivotal year for Ron Sanchez
It’s an important year for Charlotte men’s basketball. And it’s an equally important year for its coach.
Sanchez, the longtime Washington State and Virginia assistant and Tony Bennett disciple, is entering his fifth season at the 49er helm. He inherited the remnants of a six-win team in 2017-18 and has gradually molded the program in his image: Charlotte runs a Bennett-coined pack-line man-to-man defense and runs a pretty potent Princeton offense — one that manufactured 70 points per game, a 46% field goal percentage and a Conference USA third-best 14 assists per game last season.
The coach has results to his name. He’s signed the top-ranked recruiting class in Conference USA each of the past three years, and he was a finalist for the Ben Jobe National Coach of the Year Award, given to the top Division I minority coach, in 2020.
But an NCAA tournament appearance has eluded him. His teams have gone 8-21, 16-13, 9-16 and, last year, 17-14.
The 49ers will move to the American Athletic Conference in the fall of 2023 — a conference that includes mid-major powers Temple and Wichita State. Can Sanchez’s program, this season, make a leap of its own?
2. Princeton offense runs through 6-foot-11 Aly Khalifa
Like a lot of mid-major teams, Charlotte has a deep and good-shooting backcourt. (The team shot 34.5% from 3 in 2021-22.)
Its roster has a potent distinction, though — Aly Khalifa.
Khalifa is a 6-foot-11 center, but he’s not your conventional back-to-the-basket big. The Princeton offense, one of back-cuts and spacing and off-ball-screens, runs through the rising sophomore. The 2022 Conference USA Freshman of the Year started 30 of 31 games, shot 35% from deep and notched 3.5 assists per game — with an assist-to-turnover ratio that most guards would kill for (1.95).
“He’s rare,” Sanchez said, adding, “If you ask him, it’s never about his individual notoriety or accolades. For him, it’s about us being successful.”
Occupying a similar role to Khalifa will be Igor Milicic Jr., a sophomore transfer from Virginia.
3. Return of Brice Williams
Brice Williams is back.
The 6-foot-7 redshirt junior and son of all-time Charlotte leading scorer Henry Williams was among the best scorers on the team as a sophomore in 2020-21. But he didn’t play at all last season after sustaining a knee injury in the 2021 preseason.
The Huntersville native isn’t completely out of the injury-woods just yet: Williams competed with a big face mask on during a practice last week after recently breaking his nose.
“He’s healthy, he’s back,” Sanchez said with a smile. “Unfortunately he broke his nose, so he’s got a big mask, so now we gotta figure that out. But I expect him to be a steady fix in what we do. He’s got a lot of experience with us.”
4. Junior jump of Jackson Threadgill
Can Jackson Threadgill — a Concord native who started 23 of the team’s 30 games and averaged 5.9 points per game as a sophomore — make a junior jump?
“I think there’s a big jump from freshman to sophomore year, like Aly, but I think there’s an even bigger jump from sophomore and junior year,” Sanchez said. “I say it all the time, ‘Jackson’s a safe bet.’ You know what you’re getting. He can hit open shots, makes the right passes. Seldom does he make a bad play.”
He’ll be leading a relatively young backcourt, two of whom are freshmen from North Carolina: Daylen Berry (Cary, redshirt freshmen) and Nik Graves (Durham).
5. Upperclassmen to know
Charlotte has a bunch of upperclassmen who’ve made previous stops prior to transferring to Charlotte. Among them: Montré Gipson (graduate student, Tarleton State); Robert Braswell IV (senior, Syracuse); Musa Jallow (senior, Ohio State), Josh Aldrich (graduate student, USC Upstate), Regin Larson (senior, Pfeiffer) and Lu’Cye Patterson (redshirt sophomore, Missouri State).
