Campbell Basketball, Hard Choices &
Silent Reality At Small, Private Schools
By Mike Waddell
North Carolina Sports Network
(last updated April 3, 2026)
There was a time when Buies Creek mattered in basketball in a way that doesn’t translate through a box score or a grainy YouTube clip.
If you weren’t there, it’s easy to wave it off as old‑head nostalgia. But it was real.
In 1992, under coach Billy Lee, Campbell crashed the NCAA Tournament. Thirty-four years later, that remains the program’s only March Madness appearance, but for a few days, college basketball fans had to learn what a “Fighting Camel” was and pretend they knew where Campbell University sat on a map.
That wasn’t some freak bounce of the ball. It reflected what happens when a small place is aligned, resourced just enough and stubborn enough to believe it belongs in rooms people assume it should never enter.
Campbell basketball is more than that one bracket line, though. For a long time, Carter Gym was part of the state’s basketball bloodstream.
The Campbell Basketball School turned a tiny spot in Harnett County into a summer crossroads. Kids came through. High school coaches came through. College coaches came through. The game lived in that building.
Terry Holland had roots there, Pete Maravich passed through that ecosystem in his own way, and for a good stretch, Buies Creek was not just along for the ride in North Carolina basketball culture; it was helping to shape it.
That’s the context you have to hold in your head when you look at what’s happening now. Because this moment isn’t really about one coach’s record or one offseason move, it’s about whether a place such as Campbell can still afford to matter in Division One basketball at all, in an era when many mid‑majors are chasing March Madness with champagne dreams on a beer budget.
In March 2025, Campbell made the kind of hire people in the business call “modern.” Athletic director Hannah Bazemore went and got John Andrzejek, a rising assistant, fresh off Florida’s 2024 national championship staff.
On paper, Andrzejek checked every box: high energy, recruiting reach, analytics and more. His résumé indicated that Campbell wasn’t just trying to cling to relevance in the Coastal Athletic Association; it was trying to punch above its weight.
Perhaps Andrzejek should have done a better job of reading up on the school he was walking into. A couple of nights of honest homework would have shown him a place already “in flux” at best and trending toward “sinkhole” at worst, with enrollment sliding and budgets tightening before he ever signed his contract.
When you stay in the big chair for only 378 days, as Andrzejek did, that fact speaks just as loudly as any exit statement, and no coach worth his salt is going to ignore that, no matter how clumsy or crass Andrzejek’s social‑media rebuttal of Campbell’s leadership might have sounded on the way out.
Those exit details mattered because the CAA is not the Big South. It’s deeper. It’s more expensive. It’s full of places such as UNC Wilmington, College of Charleston and Towson, which have decided, very clearly, that basketball is worth writing real checks for.
It’s not the same CAA that once sent George Mason and VCU on wild Final Four runs, but it’s still a league where simply having your logo in the standings doesn’t mean you’re truly competing.
Campbell said it knew that going in. It acted as if it knew that with the Andrzejek hire.
Then the air started leaking out of the balloon, and not from the bench.
The biggest structural change in Buies Creek was the summer 2025 exit of long-time president J. Bradley Creed, whose decade in charge coincided with a slide in enrollment and a string of decisions that, if you’re being generous, you could call “erratic.”
According to federal IPEDS data and Campbell’s own public enrollment disclosures, the university’s total student population has dropped from 6,484 in 2015-16 to 4,963 in 2024-25, a decline of 1,521 students, or 23.5 percent. Undergraduate enrollment has fallen even harder over that span, from 4,455 to 2,699, a drop of 1,756 students, or 39.4 percent.
For a tuition‑driven private school, that’s not a blip. That’s a structural problem and the lingering legacy of the Creed era.
Against that backdrop, a young basketball coach was being asked to win in a tougher league with less margin for error and less certainty about what resources would actually be there from year to year.
Under former athletic director Omar Banks, who was dismissed in June 2022, Campbell’s final stretch in the Big South looked like a department that knew exactly who it was and how to win within its means.
The 2021-22 academic year wasn’t just solid; it offered a snapshot of healthy alignment. Campbell captured a school‑record 13 conference championships across its league affiliations, including Big South regular‑season and tournament titles in baseball, softball and men’s soccer, a women’s soccer regular‑season crown, a women’s basketball regular‑season title, championships in men’s indoor track and field and volleyball, plus women’s golf, men’s tennis and a Southern Conference wrestling tournament.
No other Division One school in North Carolina got close to that number of league titles that year. For a moment, Campbell looked like the model of how a small, private university could achieve success when the competitive landscape roughly matched its resources.
But that edge has not carried over into the CAA under Bazemore, who officially took over in November 2022, after serving during the transition from Banks.
Bazemore now oversees a department operating in a league that demands more — more money, more depth, more infrastructure — and the results reflect it.
The titles that once came with regularity in the Big South have been far harder to find in the CAA, not because the people stopped working, but because the level changed. Campbell went from a conference where it could impose itself to one where it is still trying to establish a footing, and the gap between those two realities is showing up exactly where it always does: on the scoreboard and in the trophy case.
On April 1, after just one season, Andrzejek walked away from his post in Buies Creek to join coach Pat Kelsey’s staff at Louisville, trading the CAA for the ACC and leaving behind a program he never really had time to put his fingerprints on.
Coaches move. Most in this business have a suitcase half‑packed. That part wasn’t new.
What was different was how clearly Andrzejek explained why he was leaving. He didn’t hide behind “family reasons” or “a new challenge.” He said the quiet part out loud: that Campbell had chosen not to fully fund men’s basketball at the level required to compete in its own league, and that under the current structure there was no realistic path for him to build what he was hired to build.
Here’s one uncomfortable piece: He’s probably right about the finances. And here’s the second uncomfortable piece: The way he said it is going to follow him around.
At the mid‑major level in 2026, the game behind the game is money. If you don’t have institutional alignment, if you don’t have any real Name-Image-Likeness structure beyond a couple of t‑shirts and a QR code, if your president and board aren’t prepared to fund basketball at something close to the league median, you’re not really building a program.
You’re merely keeping one alive. You’re filling out a schedule. You’re hoping that once every decade, the stars line up and you steal a bid. Everyone in college athletics understands the difference between “existing” and “competing.” Most just prefer to talk around it.
And it’s not just basketball. A similar story plays out on the football field, only more harshly.
Campbell reinstated football in 2008 after a 58‑year hiatus, starting in the non‑scholarship Pioneer Football League before moving to scholarship status and joining the Big South in 2018.
Under founding coach Dale Steele and successor Mike Minter, the Camels slowly climbed out of expansion pains into occasional winning seasons and brief conversations about FCS playoff contention. At the same time, Barker‑Lane Stadium and other facilities were upgraded to try to keep up.
But the big picture hasn’t changed much: Since reinstatement, Campbell has played more than 180 games and won only about a third of them, the profile of a program fighting uphill against the economics of its own level.
The current head coach, Braxton Harris, took over after Minter’s tenure ended and has just five wins over his first two seasons. That’s not an indictment of Harris as much as it is a reflection of the hill he’s been asked to climb with the tools at hand.
Football at the FCS level is rarely financially self‑sustaining, let alone profitable. When you line up generated athletic revenue against total expenses, most FCS departments are deep in the red, and football is the single largest cost-driver.
Ticket sales, modest media money and donations usually can’t cover 63 scholarships, coaching staffs, travel and facilities, so universities backfill with institutional support and mandatory student fees.
In practice, FCS football functions more as a subsidized enrollment, branding and campus‑life tool than a true profit center. If your enrollment is sliding, that “tool” becomes another weight on the balance sheet.
To really understand why the tension at Campbell feels so sharp right now, you have to zoom back to the decision that changed the whole board: leaving the Big South for the CAA.
The primary motivation wasn’t hoisting more trophies; it was enrolling more students and repositioning the institution. I know a lot about this decision, as I was in the room, advising Creed during my brief time at Campbell, as a member of Banks’ senior staff.
The bet was simple and, on paper, logical. Align with a different collection of institutions in a broader geographic footprint. Put “Campbell University” in front of more families up and down the East Coast. Lean into the “Coastal” branding. Look and feel like a more visible, more ambitious option for a shrinking pool of college‑bound teenagers. That isn’t a bad goal. It’s just not a pure athletic calculation. It’s a survival one.
The problem is that the enrollment story hasn’t matched the PowerPoint presentation. Over the past decade, Campbell’s total student population has declined from 6,484 to 4,963, a 23.5 percent drop, and undergraduate enrollment has fallen from 4,455 to 2,699, a 39.4 percent decline.
For a tuition‑driven private school, that’s not a blip. That’s a structural problem. You can call it demographics, competition, whatever you want, but Campbell’s own filings tell the same story: fewer students, less tuition income, more pressure everywhere else.
And Campbell is not some outlier.
This is the silent, shared crisis facing small, private universities across the country. There are fewer high school graduates in certain regions than there used to be. Families are more price‑sensitive. Public options, community colleges and online programs are all pulling from the same pool. When you add the travel and operating costs of a more far‑flung, flight‑heavy league such as the CAA onto that erosion, the math stops being flexible. It hardens.
The CAA doesn’t fix that. It’s a good basketball league, but it’s not a big media‑rights league. A lot of the inventory lives on streaming. When games do hit linear TV, it’s usually a weekday window on secondary networks, not a Saturday afternoon on a flagship channel. That exposure has value, but it does not drop life‑changing checks into Campbell’s account every year. Revenue is still overwhelmingly internal. The new costs are not.
The CAA also provides far less top‑line media exposure than the Big South, which has long been aligned with ESPN and routinely placed games on the ESPN family of networks and ESPN+. By comparison, CAA men’s basketball inventory is more fragmented across regional sports networks, streaming partners and secondary cable windows, with far fewer opportunities to reach a true national audience.
That’s why schools such as UNC Wilmington, High Point, Queens and UNC Greensboro are instructive.
UNCW is the gold standard for a North Carolina mid‑major right now, leaning hard into basketball as the one sport that can actually pop financially at this level and stacking regular‑season titles and postseason appearances. High Point and Queens are rising on the same model, while UNCG has stayed relevant and recently hired former Stanford head coach Jerod Haase to keep pushing men’s basketball forward.
A common denominator? None of them plays football. They’ve looked at the math and decided that if you’re going to chase upside, you chase it where a small roster and one bid can change your year.
Of course, making the NCAA Tournament is tough. UNC Greensboro’s men’s team last made the Big Dance in 2018. Campbell’s men’s team last (and only) made it in 1992. That’s the reality everyone is fighting through, and still, those schools have decided basketball is the only game that gives them even a snowball’s chance in hell of delivering a financial return.
Football doesn’t magically balance the books, either. Quite the opposite.
At the FCS level, 63 scholarships, full staff, equipment, travel and facilities make football a campus‑life and branding play, not a pure profit center. It can help male enrollment. It can build community. For most small, private universities, though, it does not write its own checks.
So picture the stack: a tuition‑dependent university with fewer undergrads than it had a decade ago, a more expensive league than it used to be in, and a national environment where the cost of doing Division One business just went up again.
That’s what Andrzejek was really talking about when he said there was no path forward under the current structure. That’s what a lot of mid‑major coaches whisper about off the record, in every league from the Northeast to the West Coast.
The sting at Campbell is that the school already had a blueprint for how a small place can punch above its weight. It was baseball. Under Justin Haire, Campbell became one of the most consistent mid‑major baseball programs in the country, racking up conference titles and NCAA Regional trips, and being discussed on national broadcasts in June. That was a case study: targeted investment, smart hiring, development and patience.
Even that model is feeling the CAA squeeze now. Under second‑year head coach Chris Marx, Campbell is still capable and still dangerous, but the waterline in the new league is higher. The roster builds are tougher. The margin for error is thinner. What was sustainable in the Big South takes more money, more depth and more time in the CAA. Even your best stories feel the strain.
And this isn’t the first time Campbell has pulled back from a program that was actually working.
Under Creed, the university scaled back its investment in wrestling, undercutting one of its most nationally respected teams. Under Scotti Sentes, Campbell wrestling became a legit mid‑major power, producing NCAA qualifiers and top‑25‑caliber seasons that many peer schools would kill for.
Then the institutional priorities shifted. The support changed. Sentes eventually moved on. What’s left today is not the same program. People who were there know every detail of that story. Most people outside the building don’t.
That’s why it’s a mistake to treat Andrzejek’s exit as some isolated bit of drama. There’s a pattern here, and it’s not unique to Campbell.
When the financial pressure rises, athletics gets re‑sorted. The programs that felt “safe” suddenly realize that word doesn’t really exist in this era. Coaches can reroute. Administrators can rewrite org charts. The people who absorb the blow are the athletes.
All of this is happening while the rules of the entire industry are being rewritten in real time. The House settlement and other legal pressures have introduced revenue‑sharing expectations into Division One without providing schools with a matching, guaranteed revenue stream to pay for them.
The CAA opted into that deal before Campbell’s current president, William M. Downs, ever settled into his chair. By the time he officially took over, the economics of his athletic department already had changed.
Downs’ answer has been a five‑year strategic plan built on trying to grow enrollment back, tighten fiscal discipline and chase more external funding after years when the spending habits under Creed and his cabinet weren’t built for this NIL and revenue‑sharing era. He inherited declining enrollment, higher conference costs and a looming new line item called “we’re going to have to share more money with athletes now,” all while donors and fans still want more wins and better facilities.
Something has to give. At a place such as Campbell, it almost always comes down to athletics.
Here’s the part fans never want to hear, and administrators rarely say plainly because it lands like a punch to the gut: the mission statement does not start with “win games.” It starts with “educate students.” When the budget gets tight, and you’re sitting in a room deciding whether to cut a sport, freeze scholarships, postpone a facility project, or trim academic support, athletics doesn’t automatically win those arguments just because it has a scoreboard and a fan base.
Meanwhile, on the national stage, some of the same people who built their careers on player mobility are now trying to clamp down on the one group in this story that doesn’t have a lobbyist.
Proposals from people such as Senator Tommy Tuberville (the long-time college football coach) have floated the idea of limiting how often athletes can transfer without penalty, even as coaches, presidents and conferences continue to move freely.
Think about that in this context. Coaches can jump jobs. Schools can change leagues. Presidents can recalibrate commitment. The people being told to sit still are the kids whose careers are most directly affected when the adults chase a new dream or pull the plug on an old one.
So, no, this is not just a Campbell story. It’s a mid‑major Division One story in 2026, with Campbell as a very honest case study.
It’s about enrollment. It’s about economics. It’s about survival. All of it is happening with March Madness highlights on loop in the background, convincing everybody that if they just hold on a little longer, their turn is coming.
Andrzejek might be exactly right about the financial reality at Campbell. That doesn’t mean everyone in charge of hiring will love the way he chose to say it. Both truths live in the same space.
The harder truth for Campbell is this: The most consequential decision in this whole saga didn’t belong to the coach who left for the ACC. It belongs to the institution trying to decide, in real time, what it can still afford to be in a sport it once helped grow.
That’s the cost of chasing madness with champagne dreams on a beer budget.
NOTE: NCSN requested comment from Dr. William Downs of Campbell University, and he declined, via University Communications. Dr. Downs has an open invitation to join us for a live-to-tape interview at any time of his choosing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mike Waddell is a former athletic director at CAA member Towson University and a former senior-level administrator at Campbell and other Division One universities. During his tenure at Towson, he hired the winningest coaches in TU history in men’s basketball, volleyball and men’s lacrosse, while also leading the charge for building SECU Arena and the reformation of the school’s football program, which improved from 1-10 in 2010 to back to back CAA titles in 2011 and 2012 and an FCS national runner-up finish in 2013.
