This NC high school football coach nearly lost everything. Now he’s building a program
In the summer of 2021, Hopewell High’s Brandon Gentry wasn’t sure if he wanted to coach anymore.
He had just left West Cabarrus High School, where he’d coached for one season. He gone to what was then a new school in Cabarrus County as a hero, a guy who’d built a winner at Northwest Cabarrus and was seen as one of the bright young minds in North Carolina.
And then, it all seemed to go dark.
Gentry, now 43, said he felt frustrated by what he called “miscommunication” between himself and people in human resources with the school system after a winless season.
He said it got bad.
“I just decided to step away,” he said. “It was nothing crazy.”
Since then, he’s taken quite the journey: from being out of a job and nearly going broke to emerging as the Deer Park N.C. coach of the week for winning at a place, at least so far, where few people have won.
Last Friday, Hopewell upset previously unbeaten Berry High School 20-12 and improved to 2-1. That’s the Titans best start since 2010. A year ago, in Gentry’s first season, Hopewell was 1-9 and was outscored by an average of 40-14.
“Honestly,” he said, “I could see us getting better, and I knew if we stopped doing very stupid things that cost us games that we could win some. We worked extremely hard in the offseason and we had a lot of people coming back. I thought if we could stay injury-free and execute the plan, I saw us winning some games.”
So far, Hopewell is doing that, but that gets us a little ahead of the story.
First, we’ve got to go back.
From assistant to success
Gentry grew up in Boiling Springs and played at Crest High School. He played tight end and defensive end on two state championship teams in 1994 and ‘96. After high school, he played two seasons of defensive end at Appalachian State before he transferred to Gardner-Webb, where he earned a distinction as a “lifetime captain.”
Not long after college, Gentry began his coaching career as an assistant Crest, and ultimately spent 11 years with the Chargers as well as at Polk County, West Charlotte, Byrnes (SC) and TL Hanna (SC).
In 2016, he got the head job at Northwest Cabarrus, taking over a team that not had a winning season in four years.
Gentry’s first team was 2-9. His second was 6-6. And his past two? They were 25-3 with a couple of state playoff runs.
He left for West Cabarrus before the 2020 season.
“At the end of the day, (Cabarrus County Schools was) opening West Cabarrus and they redrew the lines,” Gentry said, “and I felt they were taking all my neighborhoods (where Northwest Cabarrus drew from) and sending them to West Cabarrus. Some people in the county felt I’d look for other jobs and they said, ‘Why not apply for West Cabarrus? It’ll be most of your kids anyway.”
A bad marriage and a move
That one year at West Cabarrus didn’t go well. Coming off back-to-back league titles at Northwest Cabarrus, scoring 76 points over the course of a season was a tough adjustment.
And when Gentry decided to leave, he decided to leave coaching.
“I just thought I wasn’t going to coach again,” he said. “I was like, ‘Well, stuff happens for a reason, and maybe it’s time for me to do something else.’”
Gentry, married with a family, decided to start a small trucking business in the summer of 2021, shortly after the school year ended. He got off the ground and had routes through Columbia, South Carolina, and to Charlotte. But more money was going out of his savings account than what was coming in.
“it’s a lot of work,” Gentry said, “and I didn’t have the structure to do it. So I’m sitting there broke and I had a couple job offers from some schools in Columbia, but I didn’t want to uproot my family. (Mallard Creek coach) Kennedy Tinsley hit me up and Mallard Creek was 10 minutes from the house. I didn’t even know he knew who I was, but I didn’t want to get an apartment (in South Carolina) and see my son on the weekend.”’
Return to coaching
So, pretty quickly, Gentry was back coaching. And after one season with Mallard Creek, he took the Hopewell job after Jamelle Byrd resigned.
And like Northwest Cabarrus, Hopewell is a rebuilding project. But an even bigger one.
The Titans have had a winning season in 13 years. Since that 2010 season, Hopwell has had six seasons with one or fewer wins, including going 1-9 in 2022 under Gentry.
But Gentry could feel, deep down, that this season could be different.
“We had about 15 (starters) come back,” he said. “We had seniors who had played a lot. We had so many injuries last year. We had kids start that in a normal year wouldn’t. Going into the North Meck game last year, we didn’t’ have a single wide receiver available. We started JV guys. We had shoulders, collarbones, torn labrums. Anything you can think of, we had it.”
Hopewell had only 32 players last season, so any injury was nearly catastrophic. But Gentry and his staff were able to sell a vision to the school and its community, similar to what he’d done at Northwest Cabarrus, about future success. It helped that Hopewell played better in some games towards the end of the ‘22 season.
This season, Gentry has 50 junior varsity and 42 varsity players. The Titans have a bye this week and play at Harding Thursday Sept. 14. After that, games against nationally ranked Mallard Creek and Hough are on the schedule, but there are some winnable games, too.
Gentry believes Hopewell can keep its momentum.
“We’re happy to win,” he said. “I don’t care who it is. It felt good to them to be a in a tight ballgame with Berry and win that. Last year, we would give up the play to lose. This year, to be in that ballgame and make plays we needed to win, it felt good to them. To me, that’s a step forward.”
At Mallard Creek, Gentry always saw Hopewell as a school with potential, with a solid feeder area to draw from.
He sees possibilities.
“I’d like to build it up and be around,” he said. “When I was in South Carolina trying to move up the ladder, my daughter had been to three different elementary schools, and me and my wife said, we don’t want to do the whole move around thing anymore. We’ve been in the same neighborhood for seven years now, and I wanted to find a spot I could call home.
“I don’t want to come to Hopewell to build it up to be good and then go to Columbia to chase a check. I want to come home to my kids every day. I’d love to build this place up to be a perennial state playoff contender and if we can one day win a state championship, that would make feel like I did my job.”
2023 coach of the week honorees
Week 1: Kennedy Tinsley, Mallard Creek
Week 2: Ben Kolstad, Leesville Road
This story was originally published September 6, 2023 at 1:45 PM.
