By Mike London
mike.london@salisburypost.com

SPENCER— The shadow cast by back-to-back state champion West Rowan was long and wide, but North Rowan’s girls basketball team managed to find some sunshine and put together a memorable season.

The Cavaliers won a program record 25 games at a school that’s been competing in hoops since the 1958-59 season. The young architect of that success, head coach Darra Walker, shares the Post’s Rowan County Coach of the Year award with West’s Ashley Poole.

Walker, in her second season as North’s coach, was raining jump shots for Livingstone College just four years ago when she was the Blue Bears’ Student-Athlete of the Year.

The Pennsylvania native led North Rowan on a journey that included 1A/2A Central Carolina Conference regular season and tournament championships despite major adversity. You can’t have much more adversity than dealing with a school suspension of two starters — the ball-handler and leading scorer and the team’s best defender — for a half-dozen games, but the Cavaliers kept their eyes fixed on the big picture and never lost their focus.

North lost two games without twins Bailee and Bloom Goodlett that they wouldn’t have lost had they been at full strength, but they won the other four.

“Some see the glass as half empty, some see it as half full, and I’ve always been one of those half-full kind of people,” Walker said. “There was a stretch there (late December to early January), where we not only didn’t have the twins, but we lost two more girls to sickness and injury and dropped from 11 players down to seven very quickly. You can’t even scrimmage with seven. But we never used being short-handed as an excuse, and we looked for the silver lining. We were forced to make a lot of adjustments and several girls took on bigger roles. Brittany Ellis, Dasia Elder and Krissstyle Stockton stepped up their games. Girls who hadn’t been playing a lot, were on the court for big minutes and got valuable experience.”

The record book shows that during the six games that North played very short-handed, Ellis scored more than 30 points four times, while Stockton added scoring to her steady rebounding. Elder, always an outstanding 3-point shooter, took more shots and made more. Zakiya Oglesby’s rebounding became a factor.

“Confidence is a key to this game,” Walker said. “From the start, I’ve preached playing with confidence, and you could see their confidence growing every game.”

By the time the Goodletts were reinstated prior to the West Davidson game on Jan. 10, North had become a more formidable team. Bailee Goodlett, Ellis and Elder combined for 66 points that night.

North would eventually extend its winning streak to 20 in a row — a program record — until the Cavaliers were finally stopped in a third-round playoff road game at Bishop McGuinness. But even in that 51-44 loss to a powerhouse team with an All-State player, the Cavaliers didn’t exit quietly.

“It was a game we definitely feel that we could have won,” Walker said. “It just didn’t bounce our way.”

Three of North’s wins during that stretch of 20 straight were against rival Salisbury, a program the Cavaliers hadn’t beaten since 2015-16. North had lost 15 straight to the Hornets when it staged an emphatic 73-47 win in Salisbury’s gym in mid-January. That was the game that put everyone on notice that the Cavaliers were a team to be reckoned with.

There also were two impressive victories against Albemarle. Albemarle finished fourth in the final 1A West rankings by MaxPreps, while North Rowan (25-4) finished sixth.

North shared a 2A Central Carolina Conference championship with Salisbury in 2005-06 when Mike White, North’s current principal, was coaching the team. North went undefeated in the 1A Yadkin Valley Conference under coach Anthia Smith during the shortened 2020-21 COVID season when this year’s seniors were freshmen.  The 2023-24 season marked only the third regular-season league title in history for the Cavaliers.

Walker picked a surprising turning point for the season — the clash with West Rowan in North’s fourth game. That was a 65-43 home loss to the Falcons, but Walker learned a lot from it.

“We held a great team to 65 points,” Walker said. “I could see there was nothing wrong with what we were doing on defense. Our defense didn’t lose that game. But we needed to make adjustments on offense, and we did.”

North was really good, even with no size to speak of.

Stockton, the closest thing North had to a post player, is 5-foot-8. Elder is 5-foot-10, but her offensive game is on the perimeter. She did about 90 percent of her damage from the 3-point line.

Bloom Goodlett could defend just about anyone, and Bailee Goodlett and Ellis poured in points from all angles. They were 1-2 in the county in scoring — Catawba signee Goodlett checking in at 25.9 points per game and Ellis, who was voted Central Carolina Conference Player of the Year by the league’s coaches, at 20.7

North (25-4) put the highest-scoring team in program history on the floor — 65.8 points per game — and despite the furious pace the Cavaliers created, they combined their prolific offense with one of the top six defensive teams in school history, giving up 36.7 per game. On an average night, North outscored opponents by 29 points.

“We played in a zone league, but we worked hard on man-to-man and always played man-to-man, and that was a great advantage for us,” Walker said. “The girls bought into playing tough man-to-man without fouling, and that’s who we were. There was a lot of heart in these girls.”

And in their coach. Walker is the first North girls county coach of the year since White in 2002-03.