Providence Day girls’ basketball looks to reclaim title behind star point guard
Providence Day has won 17 N.C. Independent Schools girls’ basketball championships, including eight in a row from 2010-17. But the Chargers haven’t held the title in five years.
This season, the Chargers aim to regain their change that history.
Providence Day returns five seniors, including former all-state star Jaida McClure, who is returning to campus after playing her junior season in Greenville, S.C., at Legacy Early College.
The Chargers also return one of the nation’s fastest rising recruits in 5-foot-11 point guard Ginny Anne Dumont, who everybody just calls “GA.” She’s got a bucketful of Division I offers, including from national power UCLA, plus a head full of long blonde hair, a quick smile and she walks and moves a little like WNBA star Paige Bueckers.
“Yeah, I see a little bit of that Paige in her, for sure,” said Cannon School coach Kelvin Drakeford, whose team has morphed into Providence Day’s biggest road block to the state title in recent years. “She’s got some ‘stuff’ to her game, where I’m like she’s going to be a great player at the next level. But she’s a really, really good high school player as well.”
Moving to a new school
Last season, Dumont, 17, transferred to Providence Day from Eastside High School in Taylors, SC, a suburb of Greenville. As a freshman at Eastside, Dumont averaged a team-high 14.1 points, a team-high 3.1 assists, and she was second at 4.6 rebounds. Eastside finished 11-9.
The summer after her freshman year, Dumont played travel ball with Stephen Curry’s old Charlotte-based travel team, Team Curry, that was sponsored by Under Armour. And she liked the competition of the teams she played against and of the mostly N.C. girls she was playing with.
“My sister went to college,” Dumont said, “and (my family was) looking to downsize, and then the main reason (to move) was just academics and basketball. I just wanted a better situation in both of those.”
Her trainer in Greenville, Marie Marquez, was actually recruited by Josh Springer, the Providence Day coach back when Stringer as a college assistant at Belmont Abbey. But another friend of Springer was the one who called him about Dumont, who by this time had been talking with her parents about moving. That friend put the Dumonts and Springer together.
“And we knew the second we talked to coach Springer, and we walked on campus,” Dumont said. “It’s just the academics at the school, the diversity here, the resources. I mean, there are four coaches on staff, two strength coaches, four athletic trainers. My English teacher is my mental performance coach. It’s crazy stuff, like you would never expect.”
As a sophomore, after her family moved to Charlotte, Dumont got comfortable quickly, playing as a nearly 6-foot point guard, where most teams centers were her size. She led Providence Day in scoring (14.4), rebounds (6.2), assists (3.1), steals (2.9) and blocks (0.5) per game.
Her old school, Eastside, went from 11-9 with Dumont to 6-19 without her. Providence Day, meanwhile, reached the state semifinals, finishing 25-8, its most wins in seven years.
“She makes a difference,” Drakeford, the Cannon School coach, said of Dumont. “I love the way she carries herself. She’s got a little bit of swag to her, some toughness, and she’s got real size, being 5-10, 5-11 as a point guard. She can a dish it and she can score.
“So I’m actually a really huge fan of GA.”
Early offers, hoping for big success
Dumont got her first offer from Wofford when she was in the eighth grade, and as she’s developed into a big downhill guard, who can also shoot and pass, other schools have taken notice.
Besides UCLA, she’s got offers from Appalachian State, Belmont, Charlotte, Georgia Tech, Harvard, Missouri, Princeton and UNC-Wilmington, among others.
“I feel like social media just makes that stuff so much crazier than it is,” Dumont said. “Like, I know kids that have way better offers than me that I wouldn’t say are better than me. I just don’t know much this stuff really matters at the end of the day, when it comes to performance on the court. But I still want to be the same kid, with the same attitude, that I had when I didn’t have any big offers or stuff like that.”
Springer has coached several McDonald’s All-Americans and N.C. Ms. Basketballs and marvels at how humble Dumont remains. He says college coaches often say that Dumont makes “everybody feel like a million bucks.”
Springer said Dumont will often lead the girls in 6 a.m. track workouts, , tape an eighth grader’s ankle in the training room (Providence Day is a K-12 school) or rebound for a ninth grader desperate to make the team.
“On bad teams,” Springer said, “nobody leads. On average teams, coaches lead. On great teams, players lead. And every coach would love to say their culture is phenomenal. Our culture, right now, is as good as it’s been in a very long time. It’s because of Jaida McClure and GA, several others. When GA shows up in the gym every day and brings everybody else with her, it makes everybody better.
“We needed that.”
This story was originally published November 3, 2025 at 6:30 AM.
