A natural leader, West Charlotte junior KD Cotton hopes to guide Lions to 3A state title
West Charlotte High football coach Sam Greiner has coached a lot of great players. He once had the No. 1 high school football player in America.
But Greiner said he’s rarely coached anyone like Lions’ junior KD Cotton.
Cotton, 16, is a 5-foot-10, 185-pound defensive back/wide receiver/returner who rarely comes off the field for West Charlotte (12-2), which will play unbeaten Fayetteville 71st (15-0) Saturday in Raleigh for the N.C. 3A state championship.
“KD is a leader of men,” Greiner said. “That’s what makes him special. He’s a great athlete, no matter what position or what sport he plays. And if you’re playing him in tiddly winks, he’s a person you have to beat. He’s got this competitive spirit, this warrior’s heart, and that makes the difference. That’s a rare trait.”
Cotton has started since his freshman season, when he was named a team captain, and he has emerged as one of the state’s premier players in the last two years.
“I feel like I have the ability to bring guys together,” Cotton said. “I started playing football when I was 4, and I’ve always been the best player and I’ve become accustomed to being the leader. I came in as a freshman (at West Charlotte) and I feel like I proved myself, proved I could lead the team. I just have to keep showing it every day.”
Shortly after Cotton’s freshman season ended, Kentucky Wildcats’ coaches were on a campus to watch a future Observer defensive player of the year named Jaden Smith in spring workouts. Smith would eventually sign with the Wildcats, after flipping from Michigan.
We’ll let Greiner pick up the story from here.
“So they’re there to see Jaden, and they go, ‘Who’s this kid at QB?’” Greiner said.”I say, ‘He’s a competitive dog.’”
The Kentucky coaches asked Greiner if they thought Cotton would play quarterback in college, and Greiner said no, that he would be a defensive back.
“They said, ‘Let him run one rep,’ at defensive back, Greiner said. “And he did. And they said, ‘Tell that kid he’s got a scholarship.’”
Growing up fast
Getting a scholarship from a Power 4 school, and one rep, basically supercharged an already confident Cotton, who played quarterback and defensive back for the Lions as a sophomore in the 2023 season. He was named as the first team “athlete” on The Charlotte Observer’s regional all-star team, rare for any 10th grader.
For the 2023 season, he intercepted five passes in five games on defense. On offense he threw for 1,507 yards and ran for 597, accounting for 37 total touchdowns.
He also started adding to the Kentucky offer. Now he’s got nearly 20 Division I offers, including Dartmouth, Duke, Miami and Wake Forest.
“The NFL doesn’t work for everybody,” said Cotton, who has a 3.7 GPA, “so I want to make sure I get a good degree from a really good school, so I can be successful in whatever I do.”
Entering Saturday’s state final — West Charlotte’s first championship game appearance in 18 years — Cotton has moved from quarterback to receiver and proven why so many colleges are interested in him.
He’s rushed 24 times for 196 yards and eight touchdowns. He’s caught 29 passes for 443 yards and eight touchdowns. On defense, he’s got 61 tackles and five interceptions.
“He plays with a great temperament,” Palisades coach Jonathan Simmons said. “He’s always in control and that’s kind of what separates a lot of good from great players. Nothing can speed him up, not trash talk, not making a bad play the play before. He continually plays as if he is playing by himself.”
Palisades has played West Charlotte twice in the past two years.
In those games, Cotton has accounted for 314 yards, seven touchdowns and six tackles. But the play Simmons remembers most wasn’t one of the big plays or the score. It was the time Cotton was playing quarterback as a sophomore and got a bad snap when the teams played at Memorial Stadium in uptown Charlotte. Cotton recovered the ball, took a few steps to his right and simply threw the ball away.
“He threw it away and reset,” Simmons said. “He has a high football IQ that really makes him special. If he was 6-2, he would be a top 10 national kid for sure. It’s like (Colorado’s) Travis Hunter, and I hate to put him in the same sentence with a Heisman Trophy winner, but Travis Hunter plays at his own speed and that’s what makes him special. KD has that same quality. I’ve always kind of thought of him highly because of that.”
Big task ahead for Cotton and West Charlotte
Cotton said the drive to get to this year’s state finals began on the bus ride home from Boiling Springs at the end of the 2023 season.
West Charlotte had blown a 16-point fourth quarter lead at Crest in the third round of the playoffs. With many of the starters just freshmen and sophomores, Cotton knew his team had the talent to make another run this season.
“We had to grow from everything that was bad last year,” Cotton said. “It was that bus ride back. We had a lot of seniors, but a lot of young guys too. We knew we needed more discipline. We needed to take everything more seriously, start taking better care of our bodies and making sure school is right. Everybody bought in, pretty much that night, and just focused in on what we needed to do to be a championship team.”
With that renewed dedication, Cotton and West Charlotte have won 12 games this season, the most at the school since 2003, when coach Pete Gilchrist led the Lions to a 13-2 record and an appearance in the N.C. 4A Western Regional championship game.
Since then, however, the Lions have had a lot lean years.
The 2006 team reached the state finals, again under Gilchrist, but from 2004-2021, West Charlotte had eight coaches and four winning seasons.
Four times, the Lions ended up with no wins at all.
This is Greiner’s fifth season at West Charlotte. He’s working on his third straight winning season, with each team making deep playoff runs.
In 2017, Greiner won an improbable state title at Harding, led by All-American running back Quavaris Crouch, who was the No. 1 player in the nation. Harding hadn’t won a state championship in 50 years and hadn’t been relevant since the 1980s.
Now, Greiner will try to give West Charlotte its first NCHSAA state title since the 1995 team went 15-1 and beat Fayetteville Byrd 20-13 in the finals.
West Charlotte is 1-6 all-time in NCHSAA finals. And Greiner doesn’t mind his team’s underdog role.
“Around school this week, there’s a lot of smiles and a lot of pride,” Greiner said. “You see a lot of WC T-shirts. It’s really cool. It’s like, hey, they know they’re representing one of the best schools in the state. It raises morale. But it means nothing if we don’t win. Winning is the expectation and not getting there, like (West Charlotte has done) so many times in the past. It’s championship or bust in my opinion.”
Like his coach, Cotton knows these opportunities don’t come around often. He’s determined to help his team meet the moment, to be the leader he’s always believed himself to be.
“Most of us don’t come from the best home situations or the best neighborhoods,” Cotton said, “and it gives us more of a hunger about what we have to do. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime blessing to be able to have a team that’s about to play in a state championship game and try to bring this thing back to Charlotte. We’ve worked for this. This is where we wanted to be and now we can’t take anything for granted. We’ve got to make the right plays and make sure we come back with this dub.”
