Longtime Charlotte-area basketball coach steps down after winning back-to-back titles
After winning back-to-back state championships, Weddington High boys basketball coach Gary Ellington has resigned.
Ellington made the announcement on social media Wednesday afternoon.
“I have always asked my players to work hard and push themselves,” Ellington wrote on Twitter Thursday. “Draw a line and sprint through it. Go to your limit and then try something new. Well, that time has come for me. Although I will continue to teach at Weddington, I will be stepping down as the boys’ basketball coach for an opportunity to coach college basketball.”
Ellington will be an assistant at Queens University, which is moving to Division I.
In high school, Ellington’s team won 49 straight games the past two seasons. Weddington won the N.C. 3A state championship in the 2020-21 school year then moved up to 4A, the toughest public school class in the state, and won again last March. The Warriors finished ranked No. 1 in The Charlotte Observer’s Sweet 16 poll, as well as No. 1 in The Observer and Raleigh News & Observer statewide rankings. Nationally, the Warriors were ranked among the top 20 in several polls.
Ellington was named The Observer’s regional and N.C. Super Team coach of the year.
Ellington started as an assistant at Weddington under Don Newton, who was the first coach at the school, starting a few months after Newton had led Chesnee to the 2000 S.C. 2A state championship game. Under Newton, Ellington began to learn about a non-traditional zone defense that had players line up in a 1-1-3 formation.
When Ellington was named head coach 15 years ago, he decided he would keep the defense but wanted to learn more about it. It was a version of Jerry Tarkanian’s infamous “Amoeba” defense that helped UNLV become a powerhouse in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. Ellington studied what Newton was doing and what Tarkanian had done. He put his own twist on it. But when he shared his plans with coaching buddies, they pushed back.
“A lot of my friends discouraged me,” Ellington told The Observer in February, “because they thought it was too difficult to do in high school, but we decided to do it because it was unique. It’s become part of what we do and who we are, and we have gotten better and better through the years.”
That unique defense was at the core of Weddington’s two-year run among the state’s elite teams.
This story was originally published April 28, 2022 at 3:48 PM.
