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After five seasons, Ron Sanchez officially stepped down as the head basketball coach at Charlotte. Sanchez resigned so that he could return to Tony Bennett’s bench at Virginia. Sanchez was 72-78 during his tenure with the program but failed to make the NCAA Tournament. This news broke during the Wes & Walker Show on WFNZ, and it allowed two guys that care about Charlotte basketball to give their thoughts.
Walker is a Charlotte alum who believed in the foundation Ron Sanchez laid down before the COVID-19 pandemic stalled all the momentum he was building. Even after guiding the 49ers to the CBI title this season, Sanchez couldn’t convince his best players to stay with the program, as he lost two more prominent transfers to the ever popular, transfer portal. The program is set to make the jump from Conference USA to the American, which should’ve made it easier for Sanchez to recruit better talent, but none of that would’ve mattered, had he not been able to keep them in the green and gold.
As for Wes, he’s concerned about where the program goes from here, because it’s not every day that you see a coach resign in the middle of the off-season, to be an assistant somewhere else. The conference move does make the job more desirable on paper, but given the lack of success over the last two decades, will make it hard to attract any quality assistants or mid-major coaches. Wes floated out the idea that they should hire a coach with ties either to the program, or to the Charlotte area, but it’s hard to imagine someone like Sean May, who played professionally in Charlotte, leaving his role on North Carolina’s bench, to be a head coach at Charlotte.
Mike Hill, the Charlotte athletic director, was on the Wes & Walker Show just a few weeks, and he admitted that one of the reasons he left the same job in Florida, for Charlotte, was the challenge of restoring the Charlotte basketball program to its glory days. With the resignation of Sanchez, that task just got harder.
