Team’s Dream Season Now A Nightmare

Things were so upbeat as North Carolina Charlotte prepared for the season. The 49ers were ranked 18th in the preseason Top 25 and favorites to win their division of Conference USA.

After all, the inside-outside combination of DeMarco Johnson and Sean Colson was back along with a recruiting class ranked among the country’s best.

Then came the hard-to-believe news just days after practice began: Freshman forward Charles Hayward had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. A close-knit team was devastated. For days, tears replaced sweat as friends tried to understand how an 18-year-old who stands 6-foot-8 and weighs 210 pounds could go from worrying about playing time to setting up a schedule for chemotherapy.

“It felt like a dream,” Hayward said of the day he was told of the blood tests taken because he had been weak and listless. “(The doctor) was telling it to me, but I couldn’t believe it. It was scary. I felt like I was watching a movie. The first thing I thought about was basketball. Would I ever be able to play basketball again?”

The chemotherapy will continue for the next six months and doctors have expressed some optimism for a complete recovery for Hayward, who was on all the top recruiting lists.

Hayward’s family does not have medical insurance. A fund has been established to help pay the medical bills.

For more information on the medical fund, contact North Carolina Charlotte’s Athletic Foundation at 704-547-4950.

700 Club

While Dean Smith’s retirement has set 879 as the number of wins for all college coaches to shoot at, the number 700 will be big this season.

Smith is among seven Division I coaches to have won 700 games, with Mount St. Mary’s Jim Phelan, 722, and Indiana’s Bob Knight, 701, the only active coaches on the list.

Two coaches are closing in on the exclusive club. Missouri’s Norm Stewart entered the season with 694 wins and Don Haskins of Texas-El Paso had 691. Lefty Driesell, who just took over the program at Georgia State, started the season with 683.

Big game

Today’s game between St. Mary’s, Calif., and Washington should have three 7-footers on the court at the same time.

Washington is likely to use its Twin Towers of 7-0 Todd MacCulloch and 7-1 Patrick Femerling quite a bit this season, and the Gaels will center their season around 7-3 Brad Millard, better known as “Big Continent.”

Starting up

The inaugural Coaches vs. Cancer Classic at the Meadowlands earlier this month wasn’t a box-office success, with a two-day total attendance of less than 10,000, but it did raise more than $100,000 for the American Cancer Society.

The field of champion Princeton, North Carolina State, Georgia and Texas will always be the first but it won’t be long before it will be supplanted as the best.

The fields for the next three years was announced and the entrants are a pretty impressive group: for 1998, Temple, Georgetown, Illinois and Wake Forest; for 1999, Duke, Connecticut, Stanford and Iowa; and for 2000, St. John’s, Kentucky, UCLA and Kansas.

The following fields overflowed: SUPCAT = COLUMN - College basketball notebook