‘Coach Hollywood’ doing double duty. Northside girls’ basketball coach to also coach boys
Donnell Rhyne, nicknamed “Coach Hollywood,” will coach boys’ and girls’ basketball at Northside Christian School next season.
“It’ll be different,” said Rhyne, 48. “I’m working on a schedule that has a lot on our non-conference games together, and of course, they’ll be some tournaments where the girls aren’t playing and the boys are, and vice versa. We’ll make it work.”
Rhyne, who will replace Ed Cooke on the boys’ team, has coached the girls’ team at Northside Christian for the past two seasons. The Knights finished 23-10 in the 2022-23 season and won the NCISAA 1A state championship. This season, Northside was 17-11 with a very young team and lost in the championship round.
Before Northside, Rhyne led Chambers to a N.C. 4A record three straight state championships and he was named Charlotte Observer coach of the year three times.
Northside Christian’s boys were 21-15 this season and lost in the fourth round of the NCISAA 1A state playoffs to eventual state champion Victory Christian. But the Knights’ administration made the decision to forfeit the final four regular-season games of the year following a bench-clearing fight at Hickory Grove in January.
Rhyne, also the school’s interim athletic director, thinks both Knights’ teams can challenge for conference and state championships next season. Northside will join a new private school conference, the Southern Piedmont, that includes state boys’ powers United Faith and Victory Christian.
“I wanted to make sure the culture was there at Northside and to change it and stabilize it on the boys’ side,” Rhyne said. “That’s one of the reasons we made this change after the (school) administration had a meeting. We thought it would be good to do this as we’re moving into a new conference.”
Rhyne graduated from West Charlotte in 1994 and played in college at J.C. Smith. He got his “Hollywood” nickname, which he still uses in his Twitter handle, form his days playing semi-pro football, which included a stint with the now-defunct Charlotte Blast in the late ‘90s.
“My personality is different now from when I played football,” Rhyne said. “I like to have fun and I can be a little bit spicy, I guess you could say. A lot of people say that’s being arrogant and called me ‘Hollywood.’ It stuck.”
Rhyne started coaching basketball with boys’ AAU ball over the summer after his football career ended. He eventually landed a high school assistant job at Mallard Creek under current Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools executive director of athletics Ericia Turner.
From there, Rhyne coached boys’ and girls’ teams at several Charlotte middle schools before landing the head girls’ job at Chambers before the 2016-17 season.
He said his experience will prepare him to coach boys’ and girls’ teams next season.
“I don’t think it’ll be any harder than anything else,” Rhyne said. “I’ve coached boys before and I know what to expect. Boys’ parents are a little different than girls’ parents. But it’ll be a fun challenge.”
