Last spring, after a 25-year journey as a Division One program, High Point finally earned its first NCAA Tournament bid.

One year later, and despite an offseason coaching change and massive roster turnover, the Panthers have captured their third consecutive Big South Conference regular-season crown, and by defeating #2 seed Winthrop in the Big South title game, they secured their second straight trip to the Big Dance.

Whereas last year’s highly successful High Point squad had the benefit of a second-year head coach (Alan Huss) and four returning starters, this year’s team is winning with a first-time head coach (Flynn Clayman), only one returning starter and nine brand-new members of the Panthers’ very deep rotation.

Clayman had been Huss’ top assistant over the past two years, but his first season calling the shots took on a different tone after four 2024-25 starters departed. Center Juslin Bodo Bodo (Baylor), guard Kezza Giffa (Ole Miss) and forward Kimani Hamilton (UNLV) left via the transfer portal, and guard D’Maurian Williams moved on to the professional ranks (G League).

Before Huss departed for a head coach-in-waiting opportunity at Creighton (his alma mater) on April 10, though, he continued his three-year trend of doing impressive work in the transfer portal, signing Southeast Missouri State point guard Rob Martin (15 ppg, 147/56 assist-turnover ratio, 40 percent on 3-pointers last season) and Cal-Northridge wing guard Scotty Washington (15 ppg, 35 percent on 3-pointers), two players who already had loads of first-team experience at the Division One level.

Martin and Washington now comprise Clayman’s starting backcourt.

“We have some very strict analytical guidelines that we try to follow,” Huss told the North Carolina Sports Network. “We try to recruit efficient players or players we feel like can be efficient within what we do. Aside from pace, that is probably the most important factor for success in our offense, their ability to be efficient, along with the ability or a willingness to be unselfish.”

Amazingly, High Point’s top players this season also include an unheralded returnee who averaged only four points per game last season (sixth-year senior forward Terry Anderson), a talented but injury-riddled journeyman with previous stops at Kentucky, Florida State and Xavier (sixth-year senior forward Cam’Ron Fletcher) and an Arizona transfer who had barely played at all for the past two years (highly efficient backup point guard Conrad Martinez).

“Just to think where we were three years ago, picked seventh in the preseason poll, it’s a true team effort, with alignment from the top down,” Clayman said recently. “I’m grateful for Coach Huss, for giving me the opportunity to be an offensive coordinator and associate head coach.

“The job’s not finished, though. We have bigger goals in mind.”

Especially given the Panthers’ previously modest basketball history, their back-to-back-to-back campaigns now rank among the most remarkable turnarounds in college basketball, regardless of how this season concludes.

The program’s only previous peak historically came under former coach Scott Cherry, a backup guard on UNC’s 1993 national championship team. From 2013-16, with the help of elite forward John Brown (who’s still playing professionally overseas), Cherry led High Point to four consecutive first-place finishes in the Big South.

After that stretch, though, and through the hirings/departures of High Point legend Tubby Smith (a Panthers player in the early 1970s and a national championship coach at Kentucky in 1998) and his son GG Smith, the Panthers had failed to finish higher than fifth in the Big South, a nine-team league.

Now they’re playing championship-caliber basketball for the third year in a row, and they may be one of the more dangerous double-digit seeds (as a #12) in this year’s NCAA Tournament.