Charlotte-Davidson rivalry clings to what erratic college basketball world can’t yet touch
As his Friday morning practice concluded, Charlotte men’s basketball coach Aaron Fearne gathered his players around him and shrugged his shoulders. He preached on “details,” a song as old as leather panels and peach baskets. He did so because, with a city college basketball rivalry game around the corner, what else is there to say?
“We’ve run the same system here, this is Year 7 for us,” Fearne said, recounting his post-practice message. “And they’ve run the same system over there for like 30 or 40 years.”
He, like his fan base, knows Davidson well.
The 49ers (4-3) and the Davidson Wildcats (6-2) will face off at 7 p.m. Tuesday in John M. Belk Arena in Davidson. It’s a matchup of indelible local history — a game between one of the steadiest mid-major programs in the country, coached by an alum with the last name McKillop, and a Charlotte team that has the potential to make its first NCAA Tournament since 2005, should everything come together like it almost did a year ago. The rivalry game has regularly come down to the wire, sometimes to the final shot. It almost always is a statement win. The relationship between the programs, on paper, hasn’t changed all that much.
Still, take the temperature of the two programs, and you’ll hear all that has changed about this game. It’s a sign of the strange times in college athletics. As the transfer portal wreaks havoc on program stability, it also dilutes what fans hold most dear: making heroes of the good guys they’ve loved for years and villains of the bad guys they’ve seen just as long. The game still holds a special place in their seasons, program leaders say, but as the tides of college basketball have turned, something new altogether has spawned.
Ask Fearne, and that “new” isn’t necessarily progress. Today’s tumultuous world of college basketball doesn’t allow it to be, he said.
“I think obviously the history of the two programs, playing against each other when we’re pretty close, it makes it a rivalry,” Fearne said. “But I think the gloss of it, unfortunately, that gets taken off the rivalry is, our fan base and their fan base, they don’t get to see the same players three, four years in a row. That’s what makes a rivalry to me. Where their fan base can get after a bunch of our guys because, ‘Here’s the fourth time I’ve seen these same guys.’ And vice versa.”
Fearne continued: “And that’s the gloss that has been taken away from what I believe a true rivalry is, which makes it disappointing. But it is what it is. Obviously our fan base has followed these games for years and years and years. There’s obviously a lot of talk about, ‘Ah, you gotta beat Davidson. It’s a big game.’ And all those types of things. I mean, every game these days is so big, and we’ve had some interesting contests with them. … But what takes more off that situation, it’s not like eight or nine of their guys have defended our system for three or four years, and our guys have defended that system for three or four years. So then it comes down to details, executing, and those types of things. This environment takes some of that away, unfortunately.”
Those thoughts, at least in part, were agreed on by the other side of the rivalry. Take it from Davidson’s head coach.
Matt McKillop knows the program’s history perhaps better than anyone. (He won’t say he has that title, to be clear, but his history with it says so.) He grew up watching Charlotte and Davidson play twice a year, back in the mid-90s when one of those biannual contests was played in Independence Arena. He remembers his father, Bob, the conductor of Davidson basketball’s resurgence, going out on Friday nights at Independence High School to see Jobey Thomas play, only to remember the heartbreak when Thomas chose to commit to the 49ers.
McKillop played against the 49ers, too, as a player, and saw the rivalry from that side. He remembers going 1-3 against them as a Wildcat, something that still stings. The third-year coach has now been the head guy against them twice and is 1-1 — the first loss was a thriller punctuated by buzzer-beating heartbreak on his home floor; the second was a down-to-the-wire win in Halton Arena.
He’s seen it all, in other words, from all sides and eras.
“As Coach Fearne said, the transfer portal era has not allowed a rivalry that is build over time,” McKillop said. “But our coaching staff, we got five guys on our staff that have played in those Hornets Nest trophy games, and have won that Hornets Nest trophy. And we can reinforce that with our players. We have guys on our team now, who were part of that game two years ago, when it was packed and it went to overtime and we lost a heartbreaker. And I think our players understood pretty quickly the magnitude of that game, and what ultimately losing that game, meant to so many of us.
“And then winning on the road last year, our players fought like that was a rivalry game, and I believe we’re going to take the court on Tuesday with the same mentality. And we’re lucky: We had a couple of alums at the game last night, our win over Charleston Southern, and we could point to those guys and said, ‘This (Charlotte game) meant something, and you gotta carry that on.’”
Davidson has returned four of its five starters from a year ago. It has Reed Bailey, who’s leading the team at 18.4 points per game, with returners Connor Kochera (16.9) and Bobby Durkin (14.1) rounding out the other double-digit scorers. Charlotte’s backcourt has seen the magic first-hand, too. Today the 49ers are led by guard Nik Graves (15.6 points per game) and Robert Braswell (12.4).
Talk to Isaiah Folkes, another one of those 49ers guards, and see the game from a player’s perspective. He was one of the few contributors remaining on the 49ers team that beat Davidson the last time the two played on Bob McKillop Court.
Two years ago Folkes made the biggest play before the biggest play — the point guard slamming home a game-changing alley-oop-from-halfcourt dunk that delivered Charlotte the momentum it needed to win.
A year ago, Folkes researched and wrote a report on the rivalry between Charlotte and Davidson men’s basketball. He extracted the stats: Charlotte leads the all-time series 31-19. Charlotte’s longest winning streak was from 1986 to 1993, nine games, the 49ers’ golden era. Davidson’s longest winning streak was from 2013 to 2018, six games. But Folkes also mined for emotions and drew on his personal experiences in that report, as granular as how the dimmer-than-normal lighting in John M. Belk Arena puts him at ease, or how consistent the Davidson fan base that has been around since the Steph Curry years and beyond.
“The fans are really passionate about basketball,” Folkes said. “They’re really supportive of their team. So it always makes the environment a competitive environment. You can tell how serious it is because they don’t play about their team.”
So it’s true the rivalry has changed. The turning tides of college basketball gave it no choice. But there’s still something special there: a history, an institutional knowledge to cling on. It’s something, at least for now, today’s temperamental world of college basketball can’t touch.
Editor’s note: Independence Arena was not home to the Charlotte Hornets prior to the team moving to Spectrum Center; rather, Independence Arena was the venue for other high-profile events in the city, including big-time college basketball games.
This story was originally published December 9, 2024 at 5:30 AM.
