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| Dan Spainhour, Founder of The Leadership Publishing Team |
By Jacob Hancock
KING, N.C. — There’s a sprawling Spainhour family tree of successful basketball players, and Hannah and Bree are just the latest branch to bloom.
It starts with Dan Spainhour, the legendary former West Stokes boys basketball coach who compiled a career record of 483-253 (.656 winning percentage) between three different schools before retiring after the 2019-2020 season.
Dan’s younger brother, David, was his assistant at West Stokes, and Dan coached his younger brother, Kevin, while at Bishop McGuinness. David had five sons: Josh, Andrew, Noah, Isaac, and James -- each of whom have played at West Stokes, with the four oldest having played for Dan.
Now, Kevin’s daughters, Hannah and Bree, are lifting the Wildcats’ girls program to new heights: a 14-0 record, the program’s first conference championship since 2001 and its first ever Western Regional Final appearance after a 67-61 win over Bunker Hill on Saturday.
“That’s been the goal for the last two years,” Hannah said of winning the Western Piedmont Conference Championship. “And we finally got to achieve it this year, which was really special.”
“We’ve been going to West Stokes and seeing the banner hanging that only says ‘2001’ on it, no other numbers,” Bree added. “We’ve been playing together since fourth and fifth grade, and it’s all been leading up to this.”
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| Bree and Hannah Spainhour |
Hannah, a senior point guard signed to continue her basketball career next season at Division III school Emory and Henry in Virginia, scored 21 points in Saturday’s win. She’s half of West Stokes’ once-in-a-generation tandem with fellow senior, center Emma Santoro. Both her and Santoro have reset the school’s all-time leading scoring record, going back and forth between sharing the record this season.
“Ever since they were freshmen on varsity, we’ve asked a lot of them,” West Stokes head coach Dillon Bobbitt said of Hannah Spainhour and Santoro. “We’ve challenged them to be leaders and take ownership of this program, and they’ve set the standard for us.”
Bree, a junior forward, is a solid third scoring option behind Hannah and Santoro. She chipped in 10 points in the second half against Bunker Hill, including seven crucial points in the fourth quarter to help seal the win.
Together, the Spainhour sisters are quite the duo. They’ve been playing on the same teams ever since they played soccer together at 5 and 6 years old. Over the years they’ve developed a sixth sense of how to play off of each other. You can see it in the way they pass the ball back and forth on a give-and-go, like the ball’s on a string, the two of them connected.
“I feel like we get more mad at each other at home than on the court,” Hannah joked. “Because we’re just teammates and we’ve always got each other’s back.”
IT STARTS IN THE HOME
Their love for basketball predates their playing days, going back to their early childhood when their father, Kevin Spainhour was the boys basketball coach at Mount Airy from 2003-2012.
“I remember going to every single game and sitting in the corner,” Bree said.
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| Kevin Spainhour |
“That was kind of before we fell in love with basketball, so we didn’t pay attention as much,” Hannah added. “But looking back, that’s what started the love for the game, was being at basketball games all the time.”
Of course, Hannah and Bree have more than just their father and uncle to look to for basketball inspiration. In fact, the most successful basketball player in the household wasn’t even born a Spainhour; their mother, Laura Haynes Spainhour, is the all-time leading scorer (2,283 points) at Guilford College, where her No. 33 jersey is retired and hangs in the rafters.
Kevin and Laura both had stints in which they coached their daughters’ teams, which undoubtedly contributed to the girls’ present-day success. But the roots that ground the Spainhour family basketball tree go back a lot further.
SETTING THE PRECEDENT
It starts all the way back in Dan’s early days as a head coach at Bishop McGuinness, where he coached Kevin, the youngest of his three siblings. Dan initially had some concerns about how it might work out mixing family and coaching, but Kevin had his mind made up that he was going to play for his big brother. It turned out to work pretty well, as Kevin was named Conference Player of the Year as a senior and helped lead the Villains to the 1992 and 1993 NCISAA state championship games.
“If (Kevin) wouldn’t have been the person that he was, it may have changed me on a whole different level, saying ‘I don’t want to coach family,’” Dan said. “But because it was so easy with him, I loved it and I enjoyed it. I think it helped make us stronger.”
It turns out, it worked pretty well with his nephews too. Just look back to last season when Isaac Spainhour led West Stokes’ boys team to a 25-5 record and the fourth round of the NCHSAA 2A playoffs in their uncle Dan’s final season as head coach. Isaac averaged 17.2 points per game, was named the Western Piedmont Conference Player of the Year and finished as the school’s all-time boys leading scorer with 1,880 points, surpassing his older brother, Josh’s mark of 1,264 points (2009-2013).
Josh went on to play at Guilford College, where his uncle Kevin and aunt Laura played, and is now the freshman boys basketball coach at Mount Tabor.
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| Isaac Spainhour |
Isaac is currently a walk-on at Florida State, where he plays for nationally-renowned head coach Leonard Hamilton, who has a history with the Spainhour family.
COMING HOME
Hamilton hired Dan to join his coaching staff at Miami from 1996-1998. Dan left Miami to become the first athletic director at West Stokes in 1998 and boys basketball coach in 1999, and then Hamilton brought him back to join the staff at FSU from 2005-2006 before Dan ultimately decided to return to West Stokes in 2007.
“The hardest thing that I did in my career was leaving Florida State,” Dan said. “But now when I look back, I see that maybe there was a higher calling, there was a reason that I needed to do that, because I can see things that fit. I can see Isaac there now, I can see Kevin as a principal at West Stokes -- when I came back at the time Kevin was still coaching at Mount Airy. So those parts, him coming to West Stokes sort of worked because I’d come back. So I see now, but at the time it was a tough decision.”
Between Josh and Isaac were their brothers Andrew and Noah, who also played for their uncle Dan at West Stokes. There’s been a Spainhour playing on every West Stokes boys basketball team since 2009.
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| David Spainhour (left) |
That tradition continues today with James Spainhour, the youngest of the five boys of David and Traci Spainhour. James is a sophomore center who flashed a lot of potential down the stretch for the Wildcats, who won seven of their last eight games to end the regular season.
‘UNCLE DAN’
While Dan more directly impacted the nephews he coached -- Josh, Andrew, Noah and Isaac still call him “Coach” to this day -- his influence on Hannah and Bree is subtle, but still apparent.
“One thing that stood out to me is whenever we’d have Christmas or anytime we were together as a family, he was ‘Uncle Dan.’ He wasn’t ‘Coach Dan.’ He was good at separating that,” Hannah said.
“Some of our best memories come from doing his basketball camps each year,” Bree added. “We do learn a lot from him basketball-wise. But he’s still Uncle Dan.”
There’s been a whole lot of success in the Spainhour family, and Dan’s fingerprints are all over it. Not just basketball success either. Kevin went on to become principal at West Stokes in 2013 and is now transitioning to principal at West Forsyth.
“Whether or not he knew it at the time, Dan ended up playing a big role in the path I ended up taking,” Kevin said. “Everything I learned about being a leader, as a coach and now as a principal, started with him.”
FOUR SQUARE?
Basketball is a big part of the Spainhour family, but it isn’t the only thing. Hannah is a member of the West Stokes girls soccer team, and Bree was an integral part of the Wildcats’ volleyball team that won the Western Piedmont Conference Championship.
“In our family, there’s no ‘We expect you to play basketball,’” Hannah said. “If you want to play basketball, that’s great, and everyone in the family supports you, which I think is good.”
There are countless examples of the lives Dan impacted -- the players he coached, the kids who attended his basketball camps, the coaches he helped mentor through his publishing company, The Leadership Publishing Team. Perhaps the best example of his legacy, though, can be found in the Spainhour cousins’ family Four Square games.
“If our family has something in second place behind basketball, it’s Four Square,” Hannah said with a laugh.
Any time the Spainhour cousins get together to play Four Square, it’s always a big scene. There’s a Four Square court taped out in their grandma Dianne Spainhour’s basement.
The cousins would often draw crowds around them when playing on their annual Labor Day weekend family vacation in North Myrtle Beach.
“You would think it was the World Series of Four Square, the way they were playing,” Kevin joked about the kids. “There’s no better example of the Spainhour family competitiveness.”
Over the years, the Spainhours have added all kinds of new rules to the game of Four Square, including Four Square Doubles, where you play with a partner, as well as One-on-One challenges when there’s an argument about a ruling.
WHO’S THE BEST SPAINHOUR?
The competitive genes definitely run strong in the Spainhour family. So strong, that Dan had absolutely no interest in answering who he thought was the best Spainhour basketball player.
“That’s gonna cause some Christmas issues if I give an answer,” Dan said with a laugh, only half-joking. “That’s tough when you just compare the boys, and then when you compare the girls -- I like them all.”
Take your pick of whichever Spainhour you want, but Hannah and Bree have the opportunity to do something that no Spainhour has done on a basketball court: win a state championship.
West Stokes (14-0, 10-0 Western Piedmont 2A) will take on Shelby (17-0, 12-0 Southwestern Athletic) -- the same school that knocked out Dan and the West Stokes boys in his final game last year -- in the Western Regional Final on Tuesday for a shot at the state title this weekend.
“We’ve been playing with these girls since fifth grade,” Hannah said. “Just getting to see us go through middle school into high school, all the hard work we’ve put in. I think we can achieve anything we want, really.”
--https://www.highschoolot.com/
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