With one second left in Portland, Wisconsin's Andrew Rohde threw a long pass toward half court, Terry Anderson stepped in front of it, and the High Point Panthers had the first NCAA Tournament win in program history. The final — 12th-seeded High Point 83, 5th-seeded and 19th-ranked Wisconsin 82, on March 19, 2026 — was the kind of March moment programs dream about for decades. The Panthers had only needed two tournaments to get one. And they'd done it with a first-year head coach.
The 2025-26 High Point season was, by the numbers, the best in school history: 31-5 overall, 15-1 in the Big South, the program's third straight outright regular-season title — the first Big South member to win three consecutive outright crowns since Winthrop did it from 2004-07 — and a second straight Big South tournament championship, sealed with a 91-76 win over Winthrop in the title game. The 27 regular-season wins set a Big South record. The Panthers spent 53 consecutive weeks ranked in the CollegeInsider.com Mid-Major Top 25, climbing as high as No. 5. It was domination, start to finish, in a league the Panthers have decided to own.
The Wisconsin game deserves the full retelling, because it was that good. High Point took a 43-41 lead early in the second half against a Badger team built around guards who averaged 19-plus points apiece. Wisconsin pushed ahead 56-50 and stretched it to 68-61 with 7:45 left on a Braeden Carrington three. The Panthers answered every punch: Terry Anderson's dunk made it 72-70, and then the backcourt took over. Trailing 82-81 with 55 seconds left after a fourth three-pointer of the night, High Point got the stop it needed when Cam'Ron Fletcher was fouled and missed the free throw, giving Wisconsin one last chance — the chance Anderson stole. Two days later, the run ended against No. 14 Arkansas, 94-88 in the second round. Nobody in purple complained.
The man in charge of it all was Flynn Clayman, and his story is the program's story in miniature. When Alan Huss — who went 56-15 in two seasons and delivered the school's first NCAA berth in 2025 — left for Creighton in April 2025 as Greg McDermott's designated successor, High Point didn't launch a national search. It promoted the associate head coach the next day. Clayman proceeded to tie Huss's Big South record for wins by a first-year head coach and was named Big South Co-Coach of the Year alongside Winthrop's Mark Prosser. Continuity, it turns out, was the whole strategy.
The roster was built the modern mid-major way: evaluation, development, and the portal. Rob Martin, a transfer from Southeast Missouri State, was named Big South Newcomer of the Year and first-team All-Big South. Terry Anderson joined him on the first team. Owen Aquino made the second team. Conrad Martinez made the All-Academic team. It was a veteran, skilled, tough group — the kind that doesn't beat itself, which is exactly the kind that beats a Big Ten power in March.
The rise didn't come from nowhere. High Point basketball spent decades as a respectable small-college program — Jerry Steele won 493 games from 1972 to 2003, Gene Littles set scoring records in the 1960s that still stand — before the Division I era brought growing pains. Tubby Smith, he of the 1998 national title at Kentucky, coached the Panthers from 2018 to 2022 without cracking the code. What changed is the building as much as the bench: the Qubein Center, the gleaming on-campus arena that seats over 7,000 and regularly fills it, gave the program a big-time stage. On February 7, 2026, 7,202 packed in to watch the Panthers beat Radford. The investment — in facilities, in coaching, in ambition — is the through-line from afterthought to 31 wins.
The Arkansas loss, for the record, was no embarrassment — the fourth-seeded Razorbacks needed every bit of their talent to hold off the Panthers 94-88 in Portland, and High Point left the floor having proven the Wisconsin win was no fluke. That two-game March sample is now the program's recruiting pitch in human form: come to the Qubein Center, win the Big South, and play on the sport's biggest stage with a real chance to win. Few mid-majors can show a recruit footage of beating a Big Ten power in the tournament. The Panthers can, and they will, on loop.
What's happening now is the defense of all of it. Fall camp is underway in High Point ahead of the 2026-27 season, Clayman's second year, and the Panthers open in early November as the hunted rather than the hunter — a new sensation for a program that spent most of its history as the underdog. The Big South will throw everything at the three-time defending regular-season champs; Winthrop, UNC Asheville and the rest have had all offseason to stew. The roster math of the portal era means reloading rather than rebuilding, and the standard is now explicit: win the league, win the tournament, and get back to March — where, as Wisconsin learned, the Panthers are no longer happy just to be there. Two tournaments, one program-defining win, and a coach who was promoted from within: High Point isn't a Cinderella story anymore. It's a program.