36 years, 800+ wins: Zoe Bell’s enduring impact on NC high school volleyball
Zoe Bell, one of the greatest girls’ coaches in N.C. history, walked into the lobby of the Providence High School gym for a photo shoot last week, and her mind immediately went back about 36 years.
All of a sudden she wasn’t the five-time volleyball state champion, the former national coach of the year, an 800-win coach so intense her peers praise and somewhat fear her for her attitude — and for her dedication.
Instead, Bell, dressed in black and looking fit enough to play, said her mind went back to when she was 28; to when she was starting her first high school head coaching job, when Providence High was about to open in 1989.
She had no clue she would become what she did.
In fact, she was more than a little nervous about the whole thing.
“I get cold chills every time I come here,” said Bell, who now coaches at rival Ardrey Kell. “When you start something from the ground up, and you stay as long as I did, I mean, it’s a special place. I don’t care wherever I coach, this will always truly be home. I remember the work and the girls that bought in and trusted me. When I started here I wasn’t too much older than them. We were figuring it out together.”
In her 36-year career, including 19 at Providence, Bell is 809-218 as a volleyball coach, with 19 conference tournament championships, 17 regular-season conference titles, eight regional championships and five state titles. If you add in her wins as a softball coach at Providence, she’s well north of 1,000.
In 2013, the N.C. High School Athletic Association named Bell among the top 100 coaches in its then 100-year history.
And she’s pretty much had a Hall of Fame career after that.
“I feel like going and watching a Zoe practice would be beneficial for anybody coaching a sport,” said former Myers Park and Providence Day girls’ basketball legend Barbara Nelson, who also has more than 800 career wins. “She has good relationships with her assistant coaches, with her players, with her parents. She’s a coach’s coach. I mean, she loves what she does. She never gets tired of it. And I really think she’s one of the best to ever do it.”
From humble beginnings and Appalachian State
Bell, 66, grew up in Charlotte and played basketball and volleyball at South Mecklenburg before she graduated in 1977. She played volleyball in college at Appalachian State, but that wasn’t easy.
She walked onto the team as a freshman, and was told there wouldn’t be a spot for her the next year. Bell volunteered to be a manager, determined to keep her dream alive.
“I knew there were always people injured, and I’d still get to play,” she said. “So I did the dirty work, but still got to play. My next year, I was a (defensive specialist) and got to play a lot. And my last two years I got a scholarship.”
After college, Bell started teaching and coaching at Alexander Graham Middle School in 1983. She also worked as an assistant basketball coach at East Mecklenburg.
Shortly after that, she got the job at Providence, when the school opened.
She quickly found success.
She taught the way she played — hard, determined, never-give-up. She was still the player who was told she wasn’t good enough, but instead of going home, shook her fist and said, “I’ll show you.”
Her Providence team won a conference title the first year it played. In fact, Bell’s Panthers won seven straight conference titles.
In 1996, Providence became the first Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ team to win the 4A state championship. From 2002-05, the Panthers won three in four years.
In 2005, Bell’s team went unbeaten, finished a run of 17 straight playoff appearances and won its fourth state title. The Panthers were 95-3 in the past three years.
Bell kind of thought she’d done enough in the sport.
She still had that passion — when she speaks about volleyball, she quickly gets excited. Her voice goes up an octave and her speech patterns get faster, almost like when you fast-forward a YouTube video with the sound up.
She still had that gaze, the look a mother gives a child, index finger extended, when you do something wrong.
That fire was still burning. She just didn’t quite recognize it, even if her peers did.
“I think Zoe is extremely intimidating,” said Nelson, the former Myers Park coach. “I’ve been in (physical education) conferences with her through CMS, and she walks in the room, and she just kind of owns it. I just think she naturally has that air about herself. She’s very confident. But she’s worked very hard to be very confident, and it’s a well-placed confidence when you’ve put in the time and energy and the effort that she has done.”
Can I live without volleyball?
But by 2006, Bell thought there was another challenge that might get her going.
By then, she had coached many players who had graduated from college and were starting their own families, and when they would come back to visit, they found a different version of the coach they thought they once knew.
“The success was great,” she said, “but the things that I get to do with these girls and interact with them is special, and when they finally get to know who Zoe Bell is — she’s not that mean old tyrant coach — when they truly find out what I’m all about, it’s wonderful. They come visit me. They call me. And I loved that.”
So after 17 seasons as volleyball coach, and running up a record of 432-86, Bell became Providence’s athletic director in the fall of 2006.
The problem was, she would often walk into the gym and see her old team practicing.
“I loved doing the AD thing,” she said. “I made sure every team was taken care of. I had great parent support, but every August I’d walk by and see those girls practicing volleyball and tears would flow. I missed it and I couldn’t stay away.”
Bell resigned as AD at Providence in the spring of 2008 and took a job as volleyball coach at Ardrey Kell that fall. Other than one year at Charlotte Latin, in the 2013-14 school year, she hasn’t left.
At Ardrey Kell, she teaches the same things she did before: Work hard, don’t quit and don’t give up.
Bell won the state title at Ardrey Kell in 2012. Her teams reached state finals in 2019 and 2021.
“She was my mentor (in 2014-15), my first year at Ardrey Kell,” said Jeff Buseick, now girls’ basketball coach at two-year-old Ballantyne Ridge. “She offered to volunteer her time to help me as an assistant (basketball) coach. She poured into me, into my girls, and it was just an absolute blessing. She has a basic understanding about motivating people, about leading people, about empowering people.”
Buseick said he felt like he was literally sitting beside greatness.
“There’s clues,” he said. “The win-loss record could be a clue. The championships could be a clue. But the biggest tell is when you talk to the people that they impacted, and goodness, she’s impacted a whole lot of people.”
What does the future hold?
Today, Bell said she finds joy in simple things, like walking her dogs or waking up very early to work out.
And she so loves her volleyball.
She learned once that turning away from true love can be painful. So she doesn’t have plans to do that again.
“Right now I don’t see any end,” she said. “When I wake up in the morning and I cancel a practice, or I think of something to do instead of go to work and practice and compete, then I’ll change, then I’ll stop. But right now, every day is new for me, and it’s a challenge.”
But even today, after more than 800 wins and all those accolades, Zoe Bell still can’t quite believe what her career has brought her.
As she is talking, she walks from the lobby inside the Providence gym. She looks up at a banner in the corner of the gym that shows all the championships the Panthers have ever won, including the titles she put up there, the 12 conference, four regional and four state titles.
While she looks up, Bell is asked what she might have thought if someone had told the 28-year-old version of her that all of this would happen, that she would be named the American Volleyball Association national coach of the year in 2018.
“I’d probably look at you and say, ‘I don’t know about that,’” Bell said with a grin. “But every year just drove me to get better. I wasn’t going to settle on what I did. I wanted to keep on going.”
And she still is.
