The G man: How a former UNC lineman hopes to rescue Charlotte’s Garinger High
In the days after he was named the head football coach at Garinger High School in January, becoming the school’s 17th head coach in 30 years, Jupiter Wilson would often leave campus to grab some lunch.
One day, as he was driving for takeout, Wilson spotted a young man he recognized as a football player walking down the street.
At Garinger, which has suffered from low turnout and struggled for wins over a number of years, Wilson knows that every player counts and every player matters.
In fact, he thinks that is a big part of the reason why Garinger is on a 48-game losing streak and hasn’t won a game since October 2019.
He believes the players have not been valued enough.
And Wilson — a former offensive lineman at North Carolina who started spring workouts this week — said he’s determined to change that culture.
“That kid was in my fourth period class,” Wilson said, “and I didn’t think anything of it. I marked him absent when I saw him. But then the second week I was there I started doing grade checks, and the kid’s got (poor grades) and so I asked him, ‘Why are you late?’”
The young man, a 17-year-old junior named Robert Shealey, told Wilson that he had trouble getting up, would often miss the bus — and school.
So Wilson made the young man a promise: If he’s ready to go every day to school, he will pick him up. And Shealey’s not missed much since.
“He’s a coach who actually cares,” said Shealey, a 17-year-old junior who transferred from East Mecklenburg after his sophomore year. “I feel like no other coach has been there to do that for me. At first I thought he was bluffing and doing that as a scare tactic, just to get me up in the morning. But when he actually pulled up to my house, it was just a shocker. It’s like he is actually concerned for his players, and that’s what has made me believe in whatever he has going on. Anything he says he has for the football team, I’m behind 100 percent.”
Turning Garinger around won’t be a quick fix, however.
Wilson is the fifth coach Garinger has had since the 2020 season, and almost all of them talk about how they were going to be dedicated and consistent and available.
But coaching at Garinger is hard.
For most of Wilson’s predecessors it didn’t work out anywhere near how they had planned.
The tough road ahead
The current Garinger High opened in 1959 on Eastway Drive in northeast Charlotte, where the school still sits. The Wildcats beat Greensboro 20-6 to win the NCHSAA 4A state championship four months after the doors opened for the first time.
Garinger reached the state championship game in 1961. In 1965 and ‘66, the Wildcats lost to Myers Park and South Meck in the Western Regional championship games.
Things were good.
Former San Francisco 49ers great Dwight Clark played at Garinger in the early 1970s, but slowly football — and most athletics there — began to spiral.
Here’s how bad it’s become:
In the past 13 years, Garinger football has had 10 seasons with no wins.
From 1998-2006, the school had six seasons with no wins, including four in a row. Several times, Garinger has sported the longest losing streak in the state.
And four years ago, just hours before Garinger was going to kick off the 2021 season at Myers Park, head coach Greg Fowler quit the team, telling The Observer that “I came there to help kids, and it doesn’t seem like that’s the prerogative. That’s my feeling.”
The principals and the language
Garinger has also had seven principals in the past 10 years and 10 in the past 20.
But the latest one, Dr. Shannon Clemons, said she’s at Garinger for the long haul, just like Wilson.
Their plan? Rebuild Garinger academics and athletics from the ground up, and have the patience to understand it won’t happen by Christmas.
“I knew that coming here there would bring some challenges,” Clemons said, “so there was nothing that was going to surprise me.”
One of the challenges, for the principal and the football coach, is demographics. At the end of the most recent school year, Garinger had 1,146 Hispanic students among its 1,679 total population.
Other CMS high schools have high concentrations of Hispanic students — Chambers (869 of 2,080), Independence (913 of 1,910), East Meck (981 of 2,345) and South Meck (1,072 of 2,380) — but at Garinger, more than half the school is Hispanic.
Traditionally, those students have not come out for football and Clemons said she’s focused on the language barrier that exists.
“We aren’t the only school that has a significant Hispanic population,” she said. “but the language barrier is an issue we work to make sure we combat as much as possible by using those on our campus who are bilingual and we look for those on campus who can assist with parent-teacher conferences, phone calls or even messages that have to be sent through the parent (email portal). All of those are interpreted for our families.”
Clemons said she plans for the principal churn at Garinger to end with her.
“I’m here for the long haul,” she said Tuesday night in her office at 7:30, about five hours after the last bell had rung. “I believe in Garinger and I believe in the foundation that’s being set here and I believe in the really good work that can happen here.”
Changes to come slow, but sure
While Clemons said she’s focused on creating a safe learning environment at the school, Wilson is focused on increasing numbers, getting kids in the weight room — and instilling belief.
The players? They say it’s working.
“What’s changed is the atmosphere,” Garinger sophomore Z’Kuario Woods said. “Every day he’s talking about change. Last year, people wanted to change, but with him, the energy is different. He always talks about how he wants to change the school, not just the football program, but us as young men. It feels good to have someone behind you like that, someone you can look at as a father figure.”
Woods and Shealey said having a winning team could help change some of the perceptions about a school they both love, a school that they feel is misunderstood.
“Everybody calls us, quote-unquote, ‘ghetto,’ ” Shealey said. “And that’s really wrong. They only see what’s posted on social media, but you don’t see what happens 24-7 around Garinger. Most of the time, everybody is just here working in their own little area, hanging out with their own people and it’s really chill. That outlook on Garinger is not 100 percent true. Can football change that? If people can see how well we’re doing, they’ll think, ‘OK, maybe the coach or maybe the school or maybe the curriculum is good, because that’s what we saw and it reflects on the players when we step on the field.”
So what does winning look like?
Wilson asked for three things when he took the job in January:
1. Help to make sure kids are in the weight room.
2. Help him to make sure kids are going to class.
3. Help him get coaches on staff into the PE department. Right now he’s the only one.
“I said if you do that, my goal is within three to five years, you’ll be a perennial playoff team,” Wilson said. “They said, ‘Can you win a state title?’ or anything like that. I said, ‘No, but I think it’s good enough that you can win five to seven games per year and be a playoff team.’”
Wilson thinks it’s a bonus that he started in the winter where a lot of recent Garinger hires tended to begin in the spring, which often did not leave enough time to build the type of real relationships that are needed, especially at a place that’s struggled for success.
“I look at this as a mission, as a purpose thing,” Wilson said. “From a spiritual sense, I’m not going to quit on these kids. I know when I got here, I was asking kids to come out. They’re like, ‘Nah, nah, nah.’ And then, I’m still here in February, March. I’m in class with them and it’s like, ‘Oh, he’s speaking a little bit different.’”
Wilson has multiple text message groups, divided by grade and one for incoming middle school students. He starts sending messages in the wee hours each school morning.
It’s a great day to be a student at the G!
Wilson has started a social media blog about the programs, and gotten new workout gear for the players, which include royal blue shirts with a huge “G” on the chest. Woods, the sophomore lineman, said it’s all new.
Wilson said it’s just the beginning.
“They don’t know me,” Wilson said. “A lot of people who know me say I’m stubborn. But I trust me and put my faith in me and in the guy above, and I think this situation is going to be different. I told a kid one day, ‘I can’t fail you.’ You may fail yourself and say, ‘I don’t feel like being that guy today,’ but I’m not going to fail these kids.”
Wilson’s immediate goal centers around academics. He noted that a major college coach upped his team’s combined GPA from 2.5 to 3.3 after his first season — and the wins followed.
“If you have a 3.3 GPA from a 2.5 that means our kids are disciplined and doing what they’re supposed to do,” Wilson said. “That’s part of the plan here. I tell our kids things will change because I’m going to be involved in every aspect. My wife says, ‘Can you keep it up?’ I’m like, ‘This is what I do.’ And here, at Garinger, it’s taken on a different meaning, and a different purpose.
“You wake up and say, ‘These kids are counting on me, whether they believe it or not.’”
This story was originally published May 7, 2025 at 9:46 PM.
