TeBorah Hawkins-Hollingsworth was a few years removed from her last high school volleyball coaching experience in Florida and liked the club setting better, giving her no desire to re-enter the scholastic realm.
So when parents of players from her Piedmont Volleyball Club 15s team asked the former North Carolina A&T middle blocker about the Northern Guilford High opening, she initially said, “Noooo, I don’t want to coach high school anymore.”
“But when they talked to me and talked about the program and I looked at the program and all of the strengths that it had and something that I could build upon and getting to know these girls more and more, I just felt like it was the right decision,” she said. “And then when I interviewed, I loved the coaching staff, I loved coach (Chase) Cochran (the Northern athletics director), I had a talk with principal (Louis) Galiotti and it just felt like home from my first interview.
“Meeting the girls over the summer, it felt like home, so that was something that tied me in and I still feel like I’m at home now.”
While “Coach T” may have quickly felt at home, and the team’s current 18-2 record and dominant 10-0 TAAC Six 5A/6A Conference championship run may indicate otherwise, the transition didn’t come easy. Kari Hankins, a much different yet successful coach whose two-year stint included going 45-9 overall, achieving the program’s best record at 24-3 in 2023 and guiding the Nighthawks to their deepest playoff runs ever reaching the NCHSAA 4A fourth round both years.
“They have very different coaching styles, very very different, so it was definitely quite the adjustment, especially because we were a young team coming in (as freshman) so we’ve been together (with Hankins) for basically all of our varsity years,” said junior Samantha Chavis, a High Point University recruit, “so it was definitely a hard adjustment at first. But we had to remember that it is equally as hard for her. It is her first year with us, it’s our first year with her, so we were just trying to roll through it together, just feel each other out and meet each other halfway.”
Hawkins-Hollingsworth’s practices put more of an emphasis on swings and blocks, while Hankins put more focus on serve-receive. Another difference, if players don’t perform to expectations, win or lose, they are going to run, and that isn’t just limited to practices.
In the team’s third match of the season, a three-set victory, the coach saw her team appear complacent against the inferior opponent, called a timeout and had them run up and down the sideline three times to get their minds right.
“I am a no-nonsense coach,” Hawkins-Hollingsworth said. “So if you give me what I like to say ‘lack of effort,’ then I in return will give you something that will make you give effort and for me, that is running. We call them ‘trips;’ we just do sidelines to sidelines, but I still try to bring that motherly love on the court and encourage them and build them up, never diminishing them, never putting them down.”
Chavis said that the first-year coach wins them over through her drive for a state championship, even if her methods differ from their previous coach, who the junior called pivotal in developing the program.
The Eastern Alamance timeout was not just an example of the coach’s different tactics but also the mindset of reacting based on what she sees instead of just the scoreboard, a perfectionist mindset, and the continuous effort toward excellence point by point.
This season, the team’s only losses, both in early-season non-conference matches, have come to higher classification programs in 7A Reagan (23-8) and 8A West Forsyth (18-5), both contests that the coach deemed winnable.
Northern won 30 sets and lost none during conference play, but even before the Nighthawks’ three-set sweep of Southeast Guilford (16-4, 8-2), Hawkins-Hollingsworth described the season as “pretty good” but at the same time saw room for improvement, more mentally than physically.
She said the biggest challenge of the season has been getting her players to remain focused consistently rather than getting too relaxed and letting points go with unforced errors due to complacency.
At the same time, she loves this team for its resiliency and recognizes a family culture not only within volleyball but for the school as a whole that fuels success. That culture has enabled the team to trust in her.
“I just think Northern as a whole is just a family,” she said. “It’s a complete family, and not just in an athletic aspect but the school in general. And I know, since working here as the treasurer, I can count on a lot of these teachers and a lot of our staff and our administration, and I think these girls (the volleyball players) can see that in the Northern staff, and they kind of take that to the court themselves.
“Even coach Cochran, he has been a big help. He has come in and talked to the girls, motivated them and given them examples of how to be great teammates, how to push each other and how to encourage each other and in every sport, it’s not just about you … it’s about the bigger program, and that is representing Northern the best we can.”
The coach saw the team’s non-conference win over Southwest Guilford on Oct. 1 as the season highlight of playing point by point. In that match, the team had a deficit in every set except for the second of four sets.
“We pushed and we pushed, and we came back and worked on again, that point by point,” she said. “I know a few of our girls, we had Samanatha Chavis, Chi-Chi (Ejindu) and Alexis Thielman that went back and walked our serves down. We were down sometimes three, four, five, six points, and they came back and went on a service run and got us back in the running.
“I think just overall we fought for it, and we showed that even when we were down, we are still going to come out swinging as hard as we can.”
Following this week’s conference tournament, the postseason begins on Oct. 18. The Nighthawks hope to capture their first state championship on Nov. 1.
“I think we have all the pieces that we need on this team to do it,” Chavis said. “I think it’ll come down to keeping the mentality there because being such a young team, it’s kind of hard for us to maintain it and keep it consistent. So I think, honestly, just being able to hold it together all throughout the playoffs (will be what it would take to win the state title).”
Bryant.roche@greensboro.com
@BRocheSports
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Bryant Roche
High School Sports Reporter
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