Winthrop assistant Dave Davis was a legend before entering Pfeiffer Hall of Fame
Deep in the hallway that runs perpendicular to the main court in Winthrop Coliseum, Dave Davis walks up to a flat-screen TV in his office. His dark-rimmed glasses sit on the tip of his nose.
The screen is paused on an ostensibly mundane, grainy video clip from practice the day before. Adonis Arms crouches in a defensive stance in front of Chandler Vaudrin, the ball-handler. Josh Ferguson is in the middle of setting a screen on the block. It’s one clip of the several hundred that the Eagles’ coaching staff grades after practice — evaluating every defensive position after every pass in every play run in a 2 1/2-hour fast-paced rehearsal.
“I’m like a kid in the candy store,” Davis says.
Davis, with 28 years of head coaching experience under his belt, is still finding ways to fall in love with the game he’s devoted his professional life to. He’s in his first year as a Winthrop assistant. Before that, he spent nine years as head coach at Newberry College and 14 years as the head coach at Pfeiffer, where he still ranks top-five in wins since 1990 in NCAA Division II basketball.
On Friday, in fact, he and two players he once coached will be inducted into the Pfeiffer Hall of Fame. It’s a commemoration of his unprecedented success at the school — and it’s also an affirmation of the principle that guides him to this day: Do the simple things hard, and the hard things will become simple.
But for now, his eyes peeled to the monitor, Davis is in his candy store. There’s the sense that he could ruminate on each frame of video for minutes. He interrupts his analysis to explain how the video clips are kept, categorized and coded, and he beams about how every file from every practice from the past seven years is stored in a digital drop box on his computer.
“Most of my film-watching life, I’ve decided after being here, has been in fast forward or rewind,” Davis says. He lets out a belly laugh and nods as he speaks: “And here, you just go, ‘Click,’ and you’re on the next play.”
He then looks at you, waiting for your admiration to match his. It doesn’t. It can’t.
“I remember he called me three or four days before practice started, and he said, ‘I want to get an idea of how practice is structured,’” Winthrop head coach Pat Kelsey said.
In response, Kelsey showed him how to access the video footage.
“I don’t think he left the office for about four days,” Kelsey added, laughing. “I think his wife, Pam, had to put out an S.O.S. because he was locked in to watching five straight days of video.”
After a few minutes at the screen, Davis walks back toward his desk, his glasses now sitting where his strawberry-blonde, high-and-tight haircut meets his forehead. He then cranes his neck down to his iPhone to text Kelsey the grades of each player from practice the day before.
But before finishing, he lifts his head to answer the question he’s heard so many times before: “What are some of the memories you’ll always carry from your career?”
He then leans forward in his desk chair, as if his answer doesn’t need a second thought.
“Relationships with players; relationships with assistant coaches,” he says.
“I’ve been ridiculously blessed.”
‘I’m going to beat this man’
Terrence Baxter called it “the dog houses of all dog houses.”
That’s where he was, in 1996, the first time he met with Coach Davis, then in his first year as head coach at Pfeiffer. Davis met with Baxter and suggested that he play junior varsity.
And Baxter made it clear: He wouldn’t do that.
The next year and a half wouldn’t be easy. His first year of eligibility, before Davis instituted his run-and-gun style of play, Baxter played less than five minutes a game. And when he’d go in, the point guard would treat every possession like a fastbreak and wouldn’t run Davis’ sets.
Baxter was the fastest player on the court and one of the best players the Falcons had, Baxter rationalized to himself. And he just didn’t understand why his coach wouldn’t let him loose.
But that summer, Baxter was determined to win his spot. He worked out with the team every time a recruit came in — and he was playing well.
“I did everything right from the end of that semester all summer,” Baxter said and then laughed mid-story. “But I come back to the start of the school year, Coach Davis puts me on JV in the first meeting.”
Baxter was confused, livid. But mostly, he was resolute: “I’m going to transfer, and I’m going to go to a school that’s going to play Pfeiffer. And I’m going to beat this man.”
He spent two weeks as a student not participating in team activities at Pfeiffer, when Davis called him and set up a meeting.
“He asked me if I’m done and I said, ‘Yes,’ ” Baxter said. “And I tell him why, and (Davis) says, ‘You may be one of the best players, but you’re not going to run my program.’ ”
Baxter admitted that he didn’t know exactly what his coach meant at the time. But he stayed anyway — and that same year, Baxter played two weeks on junior varsity before being pulled up to the varsity team. He played so well he became a starter.
Davis, then a third-year coach, started to get his team to play faster, and it fit Baxter’s style of play perfectly. Baxter is now third all-time in assists and second all-time in steals at Pfeiffer. His junior year, he led his team to a perfect conference season, and Pfeiffer made the NCAA D-II tournament.
Baxter was inducted into the Pfeiffer Hall of Fame as a player in 2017, and then coached under Davis. He’s now part of Davis’ extensive coaching tree, as head coach of the women’s team at Catawba College — and he considers Davis a friend and mentor.
It wasn’t until after Baxter graduated that he understood Davis’ genius.
“His challenge all along was for me to beat him,” Baxter said. “And once I conquered him, I surprised myself with how good I became …
“Right when you think you got it, he brings that next challenge to you. He gives you no time to think you’re good at the end of the day, and by the time you think you’re good, your career is over, and you got amazing numbers — you’re in the Hall of Fame.”
‘A basketball savant’
In 2004, Davis found his seat on an airplane next to Kelsey, back when he was an assistant coach at Wake Forest and had a full head of hair.
At that point, Davis was established at Pfeiffer. On top of winning conference championships, Davis and his team had made national headlines for their high scores; that year was one of five seasons in Davis’ tenure when Pfeiffer led the nation in scoring, Division I and II.
They were averaging more than 103 points per game — and Kelsey, the youngin Davis was sitting next to, recognized the school his seat partner coached.
“We started talking and he says he’s the head coach at Pfeiffer, and I said, ‘Oh my gosh, Pfeiffer?’ ” Kelsey said. “‘I’ve been reading about you guys. How do you score all of these points?’ ”
Then Davis, with his matter-of-fact, sharp, booming voice, explained: “It’s pretty simple. Ya have five minutes?”
Davis called it “the stand-still offense” — one predicated on taking every fastbreak, every open shot; playing so hard and fast that Davis would play 10 to 12 players a game. And he wasn’t doing it to score points, Davis said.
“It was a way to win at Pfeiffer, located in Misenheimer, North Carolina, population 300, when the school was not in session, suburb of Richfield, population 700,” Davis said. “There are a hundred Division II schools in North Carolina that are competing for the same players. We weren’t going to get the best players.
“So we had to develop a system, and if you had to break it all down, it was this: How can you win if everyone on your team is 6-feet tall?”
In the way Davis is known to do, he and Kelsey kept in touch. And they soon became friends. They admired each other’s energy, creativity and work ethic. In a way, Davis could probably see a bit of himself in Kelsey at the time: The same way Kelsey moves through Winthrop’s campus, determined to make his program an elite one, isn’t all that different from the work Davis did once the fans streamed out of the stadium while he was at Pfeiffer. Davis, with his coaching staff, would put the chairs away, clean up the locker room, edit his team’s own film — everything.
And Kelsey, on the other hand, said he sees some of former Wake Forest coach Skip Prosser, his mentor, in Davis.
“He’s a basketball savant,” Kelsey said. “And he was way, way, way ahead of his time. Now, everybody talks about these sexy terms like analytics and effective shooting percentage. I don’t know if he identified it 15-20 years ago that it was basketball analytics. It was common sense to him.
“It’s kind of like, probably, conducting a beautiful symphony was common sense to Mozart, but not to the rest of the world.”
The Dave Davis coaching tree
The Davis coaching tree extends through all levels of college basketball, and even through different sports. In one column, there’s Matt Painter, now the head coach at Purdue; in another, there’s Jeremy Currier, the once-youngest coach in the NCAA. There are athletic directors, high school coaches who have started to carve their own special legacies in their communities — and even an NFL general manager on the tree.
“He is someone who is an absolute legend who either doesn’t realize he is, or just doesn’t care that he is,” Currier said. “I would go out recruiting with him, or we went to the Final Four, and he knows every coach in the country.
“He’s respected by so many coaches: Even right now, I haven’t been his assistant for years, and people say, ‘Aren’t you a Dave Davis guy?’ ”
Those sort of interactions, Davis said, are what are most special to him.
“I once heard this when I was a really young coach: ‘Hey Coach, how did your season go?’ I don’t know; I’ll tell you in 20 years,” Davis said.
“And that means, you know, when my players have grown up and are husbands and fathers, and I’m fortunate that I’ve lived long enough to see that. I’m so proud of that.”
After Davis answered the last question I had for him, back in his office with the paused video clip of practice, he turned and offhandedly asked me when this story was going to run in the paper. I gave him a few possible dates, but ended my response to the legend in his profession with a nervous laugh: “I’m still trying to learn how to do this job.”
He then gave his tongue-in-cheek response, as if he’s answered it so many times before: “It’s OK.”
He then began to laugh.
“I’ve been faking it for a lot of years!”
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