College basketball takes N.C. by storm after World War II

North Carolina State University’s Thompson Gymnasium in Raleigh was just a small place where farmers would come in to see the horse shows and the newest farm equipment on display. 

When it wasn’t being used for agricultural purposes, the gym was where the men’s basketball team got some court time.

Games were played mostly at the Raleigh Memorial Auditorium, which could hold up to about 4,300 people.

Construction of a new college basketball arena for NC State was in the works when World War II broke out in late 1941. The project went dormant until after the war.

The original plan was to build almost a carbon copy of Duke Indoor Stadium in Durham, which opened in 1940 with a seating capacity of 8,800.

 

The first order of business after the war ended, however, was to bring in a winning coach. NC State had lost a bunch of basketball games in a row to its archrival North Carolina.

The best man for the job was Everett Case, who was in his mid-40s and nicknamed the “Old Gray Fox,” because he had silvery hair and was sly and clever as a fox.

He came to Raleigh in the spring of 1946 and told university officials that the basketball building needed to be bigger than Duke’s. 

But since the steel frames were already in place, the only way to expand was to extend the “end zones.” Hence, the architects redesigned the project, with its distinctive, elongated shape, creating a seating capacity of 12,400.

To get the job done, though, more funding was needed. The ball was passed into the court of William Donald Carmichael Jr., the controller for the UNC system, which included the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC State and the Woman’s College in Greensboro (now the co-educational UNC Greensboro).

 

Carmichael made a visit to Greenwich, Conn., to meet with Mary Reynolds Babcock (shown above), the daughter of R. J. (Richard Joshua) Reynolds (show below), who founded the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in Winston-Salem in 1875.

 

Carrying a table-size model of the proposed basketball facility, Carmichael asked for some financial support for the project. Three weeks later, Mary Reynolds Babcock sent a telegram saying she and her husband Charles would donate $100,000, the same amount contributed by the state.

She suggested, in turn, that the building be named for her uncle, William Neal Reynolds, a younger brother of R. J. Reynolds, and the second president of the company.

 

A native of Durham, Carmichael attended UNC-CH and was a member of the varsity basketball team. 

He graduated in 1921 and had a successful advertising business on Wall Street in New York City. Within the UNC system, he served as its acting president on two occasions.

Major achievements included his work in the establishment of the teaching hospital at Chapel Hill and in bringing educational television to the campuses at Raleigh, Chapel Hill and Greensboro. Carmichael died in 1961 at age 60.

When UNC-CH built a new basketball arena with 8,170 seats in 1965 to replace the old Woollen Gymnasim, the university’s board of trustees chose to name the facility Carmichael Auditorium, as a tribute to William Donald Carmichael Jr.

 

The names Reynolds and Carmichael are permanently etched into the basketball histories of NC State and Carolina. 

A sportswriter and editor responsible for several chapters was Irwin Smallwood, a graduate of UNC-CH, who covered college basketball for the Greensboro Daily News from 1947-89.

 

When he died in 2024 at age 98, Smallwood was still telling stories about NC State Coach Everett Case’s influence on the game of basketball in North Carolina.