High Point's Banbury Named VCU Women's Basketball Head Coach

Chelsea Banbury delivered something High Point University women's basketball had spent decades waiting for: a program that mattered in March. In seven seasons, she won four Big South titles, guided the Panthers to three NCAA Tournament appearances, and capped it all with a school-record 27 wins this past season. On Tuesday, she left for Richmond.

VCU named Banbury its women's basketball head coach, pulling her out of the Triad and into the Atlantic 10 after the Rams had fired longtime coach Beth O'Boyle in February. O'Boyle, who had spent 12 seasons in Richmond and become the program's winningest coach in school history, finished her final season at 8-15 overall and 4-7 in conference play. VCU will formally introduce Banbury at a press conference at 10:30 a.m. on Friday, April 3 at the Siegel Center.

For High Point, the timing is brutal. Banbury departs just weeks after the Panthers closed their best season in program history: a 27-6 run that included back-to-back-to-back Big South regular-season championships and a third conference tournament title before a 102-61 loss to No. 2 Vanderbilt in the NCAA Tournament first round. The program she inherited in June 2019 had never reached the Dance. It made three straight bids under her watch.

The most urgent question HPU faces now is what becomes of Macy Spencer. The junior guard was the 2025-26 Big South Player of the Year, averaging 18.6 points, 3.2 rebounds, 2.3 assists, and 1.4 steals per game while shooting 42 percent from the field and nearly 40 percent from three. Spencer has one year of eligibility remaining and is exactly the kind of player a mid-major program cannot afford to lose to the transfer portal during a coaching transition. Her decision in the coming weeks will signal how much of the program's momentum survives Banbury's exit.

Beyond Spencer, the recruiting pipeline Banbury built carries real fragility. She came to HPU after 11 years on staff at Florida Gulf Coast, where she helped build one of the country's premier mid-major women's programs, and she applied the same formula in High Point. The Panthers' reputation in the Big South recruiting market was inseparable from her identity. Athletic Director Dan Hauser, who originally hired Banbury in 2019, now faces a compressed national search to replace her before the portal reshapes the roster.

As of Tuesday, HPU had not publicly named an interim head coach or announced a search timeline. The Triad's women's basketball profile took years to build. How quickly it holds together without the coach who built it starts becoming clear now.