Welcome back to Celeb Shot, our freelance feature series at No Cap Space. Stephanie Kaloi has been a long time women’s basketball writer with bylines at The Guardian, The IX and so many more. While covering the NCAA women’s basketball tournament, she was able to bring us some insights on the ground at Vanderbilt and how one mid-major coach is building a potential power in North Carolina.
You can find her some of her best work here.
It takes a lot of guts to walk into Memorial Gymnasium as a member of any other team than the Vanderbilt Commodores these days.
That’s as much a statement about how well Vanderbilt has performed this season as it is about the teams they’ve faced — including the High Point Panthers, who saw their first-round March Madness hopes ended this weekend after losing 102-61.
The loss had less to do with how High Point performed and more to do with just how good the Commodores are right now. It was clear from tip-off the Panthers had expertly scouted Vanderbilt, and Coach Chelsea Banbury later told reporters her team followed the game plan perfectly. And, maybe more importantly, the team’s loss is only a blip on a path that started all the way back in Florida many years ago.
Banbury, or Chelsea Dermyer as she was known back then, transferred to Florida Gulf Coach University from Yavapai College for the 2005-06 season. The decision required her to sit out a season as a redshirt, but that was worth it; the move also connected her with a name that’s become quite familiar in WNBA circles: the school’s head coach Karl Smesko.
Smekso was the founding coach at FGCU, a title that’s nearly impossible to replicate in 2026. He worked his way up to the role by taking assistant coaching jobs at Walsh University, Maryland, and IPFW. At the time, FGCU was still relatively young as an entire school, having only been founded in 1991 (classes began in 1997). He was hired as head coach in 2002, and when Banbury showed up, the school was still working toward Division I status.
That didn’t stop her from immediately connecting with Smesko and diving head and heart first into what he was building. “I don't know that there's been anyone at least probably in my life or in my profession that had a bigger impact on me than what he did,” Banbury told reporters in Nashville Friday night. “Just every day under him was a learning experience just from the beginning, even when I was a player.”
The team ended that season with a 30-1 record, and they always had more wins than losses every year Banbury was on the roster. Playing for Smesko was like glimpsing the future, she also said while looking back. “How he looked at the game was completely different. I was down there. I played, it was 2005 and he was doing points per possession,” she explained. “Synergy didn't exist, all of that, points per shot, he was just giving those numbers to us, making them himself either from practice or from scouts or from box scores and stuff. Doing that in 2005.”
Being around that kind of foresight day in and day out can result in a few outcomes: you’ll either be inspired by it, or you’ll want to run in the opposite direction as fast as you can. Banbury bought in, and took advantage of every opportunity to absorb what Smesko offered.
“So just, you know, that analytical mind, how he looked at basketball and just, you know, I'd watch film with him. It was always a learning experience. It wasn't just sitting there watching games. It was always what are they doing, how can they beat us, what can we do that can use their weaknesses against them,” she added. “Having that different mind and giving you a different perspective of how to learn the game and look at the game and, you know, just being under him for 14 years, like, you know, it's invaluable. He's had a ton of success.”
Banbury joined the team as a graduate assistant while getting her second degree, well before the program had any plans to make the jump to Division I. The team made it into the postseason all 11 Division I seasons, and, actually, every single season Banbury was with the team.
Smesko credited Banbury with a lot of the program’s success when she announced her decision to leave in 2019. "Coach Banbury has been a big reason for our success for more than a decade," he said at the time. "She is very bright and truly understands the game. She is an excellent teacher, and I know she will be a highly successful head coach. We will miss her, but we are excited to see her earn this opportunity. High Point just made a great hire."
Smesko, who made his own decision to leave the program five years later when he accepted the position of head coach of the Atlanta Dream, told No Cap Space WBB he stands by those words in 2026. “Chelsea has a great mind for the game. She also has a great work ethic. She was involved in every area of our program, and she contributed to our success every day.”
Banbury has put that work ethic and mind to good use at High Point. As the 10th head coach in program history (and fifth since the school moved up to Division I), she’s racked up plenty of accolades: Banbury is the third-fastest coach in the Big South to reach 100 overall wins, has taken the school to five postseason tournaments (three NCAA, one WNIT, and one WBIT, and her 71 Big South wins over her first five seasons was the most by a head coach in the league’s history.
In other words, she’s tough. She knows what it takes.
Of that decision to make the jump from FGCU to High Point, Banbury also told reporters in Nashville that it gave her the chance to put her “own stamp on things.”
She added, “Maybe it's different actions. You have to evolve with what you have on your team and constantly be, you know, a learner of the game, and constantly trying to grow and you have to do with what fits with what you have and every team is different. I think I learned that from [Smesko] a lot is just, you know you have to work with what you have and be really good at that. I can't say enough about what I learned from him, but he is one of the best minds out there, I think, in the sport.”
Now that she’s seven years out from her decision to leave the program she played and coached for, it’s clear Banbury has more than come into her own as the leader of High Point’s women’s basketball team.
Which brings us right back to Nashville.
Memorial Gymnasium can hold around 14,000 fans. When the women’s team is playing, and especially when they’re playing a high stakes game like the first round of March Madness, even a quarter of that can sound deafening; the gym’s unique design — it’s almost as if the floor is a stage — can take some getting used to.
If the Panthers were nervous, they didn’t show it. While speaking to reporters on March 20, junior Macy Spencer and senior Aaliyah Collins emphasized how they were excited to be in the first round, and looking forward to showing Vanderbilt’s fans what they could do. “It feels amazing just being here with my team and coaches. They've instilled a lot of confidence in me over the season,” Spencer said. “I think it's helped me get where we are and where I am. I'm excited to be here.”
Collins echoed those sentiments. When asked about her own recent big win (she was named conference MVP ahead of March Madness), she quickly redirected the conversation to the players and coaches she traveled from North Carolina with. “Honestly, my biggest emphasis, at least for myself, is I'm just focusing on the defensive side today,” Collins said. “Offense will come, obviously. Especially with me, my defense creates a lot of my offense, but I think if we stop a lot of their key players just on the defensive side that we'll have a pretty good chance of winning. That's my biggest focus.”
Banbury was similarly unrattled. “This isn't going to be any different than any game that we've had this year,” she explained soon after. “We're going to have a game plan, we're going to do our best to execute that game plan and then offensively we're going to be us. We're going to play to our strengths. I think we have some good players and they've done a lot of really impressive things this year and that's what I said to them the other day. Our strengths got us here. Now is not the time to shy away from it. We're going to play into it.”
To that end, the Panthers did what they set out to do. They were ready for the Commodores nearly every step of the way, and fought hard for the win even after the score indicated the game would likely not end up in their favor. Spencer, who has a vague resemblance to a certain Game of Thrones character (one could say she’s the Arya Stark of women’s college basketball), was on an especially electric warpath throughout most of the game; of the team’s 61 points, she clocked 27 of them.
The loss doesn’t define the program, Banbury said Saturday following the game. “We were happy with this season. This group was able to do things that have never been done at HPU and they should be proud of that and that's something that no one can ever take away from them,” she explained.
There’s a kind of pride in that that’s pretty singular to what High Point is all about — and what fans of old and newcomers alike can expect to see a lot more of in the years to come.