After transferring from her school’s biggest rival, Butler’s Hannah Moss having breakout year
Probably the person least surprised that Butler High School’s Hannah Moss is having one of the best girls’ basketball seasons of any player in Mecklenburg County is former Independence coach Lauren Galvani.
Before she left for a job at NCAA Division II Lees McRae last April, Galvani coached Moss at Independence, Butler’s biggest rival, and saw just how hard she was willing to work.
“Back then,” Galvani said, “she did what she knew we needed her to do, and that was scoring eight points and being able to last the entire game and guard the other team’s best player. She knew she didn’t have to score 20 a game.”
In her first two years at Independence, Moss played with two future Division I players — Kaylee Carson (now at East Tennessee State) and Kam Kitchen (Virginia) — but now Moss, who transferred to Butler after her sophomore year, is showing a lot more of her game.
Butler is 23-2 heading into Tuesday’s first round playoff game, at home against Myers Park. This is the most wins Butler has had since the 2018-19 season.
Moss, a 5-foot-9 junior guard, averaged 5.1 points, 4.6 rebounds, 3.0 assists and 2.4 steals as a sophomore. Now, she’s at 16.3 points, 8.4 rebounds, 4.3 assists and 3.5 steals. The Observer recently named her as its pick for Southwestern 4A girls player of the year.
“Coming here was a lot different than the culture I came from,” Moss said. “A lot of the girls (at Independence) were going to play college basketball. That was their motivation. So it’s, like, they’re always constantly about basketball, whereas we have a group of girls (at Butler) who hope to play basketball in college but we have a lot of girls who are just playing for fun.”
Moss said she’s come in and tried to push Butler’s culture towards the one she was familiar with.
“I push people,” she said. “I might not be the most liked in practice, but after practice, we’re all good.”
Sanders said practices, especially the early ones, got so intense he had to stop several of them. In the past, Moss was always assigned to guarding Butler senior Brooklyn Saunders during Butler-Independence games. Sanders said that Moss and Saunders immediately started guarding each other in practice, and it ramped up the intensity for everybody.
“Practices were so intense and so hard,” he said, “that we had to cut back, to make sure nobody got hurt.”
Sanders took this new-look Butler team to fall leagues and matched up with some of the state’s best. That’s when he knew this new competitive culture might pay off when the season started.
“Previously,” he said, “in fall league, we couldn’t compete with anybody. This year, we played Mallard Creek, and they beat us by, like, five, and we played Marvin Ridge and we beat them once. They beat us once. Then we went to the Providence Day scrimmage and lost to Cannon and Lake Norman, but we were, like, right there.
“It was one of those things where, I was like, ‘OK, we can compete.’”
Coming off a 15-11 season, Butler was returning two all-conference caliber players in Saunders, a senior guard, and senior post Chloe Ross. But adding Moss and senior Eshe Muhammad — another former Independence player who transferred to Butler — the Bulldogs suddenly were much deeper and more talented.
Butler hasn’t lost to an N.C. team all season.
“I think a lot of these girls are bought in more to winning a state championship,” said Saunders, who became the school’s all-time leader in assists and steals this season. “We have the new girls and more returners who have played varsity basketball. We’re bought in and we want to win.”
Saunders — averaging 15.2 points, 6.1 assists, 5.3 steals and 3.8 rebounds per game — said Muhammad and Moss, the Independence transfers, “brought a lot of energy to the team.”
“They were at our rival school before,” she said, “but them coming in has kind of helped me. Now I can play with them. It’s like they’re not stopping me. They’re playing with me. It’s been weird but also good because they help us and push us.”
With Moss and Saunders and Muhammad on the wings and Ross (12.8 ppg, 9.4 rpg, 1.6 bpg) in the middle, Butler is a tough matchup for anyone. In fact, Saunders thinks her team is better than its current rankings: No. 6 in The Observer’s Sweet 16 regional poll and No. 5 in the statewide 4A rankings.
“These teams need to come and just watch,” Saunders said. “They’ll see what we are and you can see the work. You can do all the talking on the Internet, but at the end of the day, you have to lace up and play the game. I think we’ve shown on the court that we’re a top contending team in Charlotte.”
Moss said that was always the plan.
“I’m used to winning,” she said. “And I think our team is really good. I know we’re shocking a lot of people. At first, people didn’t know what our team was, and now we’re just starting to grow and show how much better we can be.”
