Mecklenburg County football coach takes job at Hickory Ridge High School

Hickory Ridge High School in Cabarrus County has hired Brandon Gentry, a former N.C. high school state championship player, as its new head football coach.

Gentry, 44, played on two state championship teams at Crest High School in Cleveland County, and he started on the Chargers’ 19 96 state finals team. He played in college at Appalachian State.

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Gentry has been the head coach at Hopewell High in Mecklenburg County for the past three seasons, posting a record of 7-23.

“I did three years at Hopewell,” Gentry said, “and we couldn’t quite get to where we were trying to get to, and I felt maybe they needed a new voice to come in and help them get there.”

Hopewell hasn’t had a winning season since 2010 and had won 11 games in the eight seasons before Gentry got to the school in 2022.

Gentry’s three Hopewell teams averaged 16 points per game. The five Titans’ teams before that averaged 9.8.

Gentry said a focus on weight lifting and academics has made a big difference in how the team performed and that more than 35 Titans’ players made the most recent A/B honor roll at the northwest Charlotte school.

“I’m proud of what we did at Hopewell,” said Gentry, who has also been an assistant coach at Crest, Polk County, West Charlotte, Byrnes (SC) and TL Hanna (SC). “The record might not reflect it, but I think the program is better now than where it was. The team GPA is a lot higher. We didn’t have kids miss out because they were ineligible. We’re bigger, faster, stronger. You can look at our kids and tell they were in the weight room. We just didn’t quite get it done on the field like we wanted, and like I said, we got a point where I felt like they needed a new voice.”

At Hickory Ridge, Gentry, 44, will become a head coach for the fourth time.

Before Hopewell, Gentry coached at West Cabarrus in 2020, going 3-4. Before that, he coached four years at Northwest Cabarrus. His final two teams were 13-1 and 12-2.

Overall, Gentry is 43-45 as a head coach.

At Hickory Ridge, Gentry will replace Jupiter Wilson, who coached at the school for six seasons. Wilson’s last two teams finished 3-19 after four straight winning seasons, when he briefly turned the Ragin’ Bulls into a regional power.

Before Wilson, Hickory Ridge had three coaches in four years: Marty Paxton was 7-5 in 2015; Jason Seidel was 23-6 from 2016-17; and Sam Greiner, now a state champion at West Charlotte, was 5-6 in 2018.

“The structure setup at Hickory Ridge is a little different than some of the situations in Charlotte,” Gentry said. “The middle school is right across the street and you can identify which players you’re supposed to have. They have a youth feeder program, the Harrisburg Cowboys, and all those things make your job easier to get to that championship status. Now we’ll see if get all those components aligned together.”