Longtime Johnson C. Smith basketball coach Steve Joyner retires in a ‘mutual decision’

Steve Joyner, head coach of the Johnson C. Smith University men’s basketball team for the past 36 years, announced his retirement Friday.

Joyner, 73, ends his coaching career with exactly 600 wins, having won his 600th game on Feb. 24 against Claflin, fittingly in what turned out to be his final regular-season home game on the court that is named for him. His win total ranks as the third most in CIAA men’s college basketball history.

Joyner said he would characterize the parting with the school where he spent 50 years — four as a basketball player and then 46 more as a coach in one form or another — as a “mutual decision.”

“After discussion with the president,” Joyner said in a telephone interview with The Charlotte Observer Friday night, “we are involved in transformation and change (at Johnson C. Smith). We agreed that it’s probably best that we change at this time and get a new basketball coach. So it is the desire of the university, and certainly I serve at the pleasure of the president. And that’s the way we’re going to go.”

J.C. Smith hired Dr. Valerie Kinloch as the university’s 15th president effective Aug. 1, 2023. Kinloch in turn recently hired a new athletic director, Denisha Hendricks, who had worked at the school before with Joyner. Hendricks is scheduled to begin on May 1. And it is the new AD, Joyner said, who will ultimately lead the search for and hire the new basketball coach.

Of the timing of this mutual decision for him to retire, Joyner said: “You always want one more year.” He added that while the team having to shut completely down for a year during Covid hurt recruiting badly, he thought the 2023-24 season, when the Golden Bulls went 14-12, was evidence that the program was once again moving in the right direction.

“I wish we had another year to see what we could have done with this 14-12 team,” Joyner said.

But the coach also emphasized that he was “a Golden Bull for life” and would help with the transition in whatever way he was asked.

“I’m really appreciative of all that Smith allowed me to do,” Joyner said, “and I’ll do anything I can to help.”

Joyner also coached the JCSU women’s basketball team in the 1980s before taking over the men’s squad for the 1987-88 season. He became the winningest basketball coach in JCSU history. He also served as the school’s AD on and off for many years while coaching the basketball team.

As evidence of his significance at JCSU, the gold and navy blue basketball court inside Brayboy Gym is named “Stephen Joyner Sr. Court.” Joyner’s teams captured CIAA tournament championships in 2001, 2008 and 2009.

JCSU did not name an immediate successor to Joyner and said it would begin a national search for a new head coach. Joyner said he was going to talk with the president and new athletic director about who he would like to replace him but that he didn’t “want to put that (name) out there.”

UNC basketball coach Hubert Davis addressed Joyner’s retirement in a news conference Friday afternoon in Charlotte. The Davis family has deep ties to Johnson C. Smith, Charlotte’s HBCU, and the Tar Heels practiced at Brayboy Gym this week in preparation for their two NCAA Tournament games at Spectrum Center in Charlotte.

“He’s just a longtime legendary coach at Johnson C. Smith and (I’m) very sad to hear that he’s not going to continue to be head coach,” Davis said of Joyner. “The things that I’ve loved about him as a head coach are the same things that I’ve mentioned about Coach (Dean) Smith, about Coach (Tom) Izzo. He coaches by teaching life through basketball, and his service — not only to his basketball program but to Johnson C. Smith and to the Charlotte community, and to the CIAA — has been something that has been remarkable.”

A native of Winston-Salem who won a basketball state championship in high school, Joyner also was a star point guard for Johnson C. Smith from 1969-73. He came back to his alma mater in 1978 as a 27-year-old assistant coach for the men’s team. He would then become the women’s head coach in 1980 before earning the men’s head job in 1987.

Joyner’s roots in HBCU schools in North Carolina and the basketball played by those colleges runs deep. In Winston-Salem, he once delivered the newspaper to the home of Clarence “Big House” Gaines, who was a groundbreaking coach who led Winston-Salem State, the HBCU in Joyner’s hometown, for 47 years.

Gaines died in 2005, but Joyner thought of him often over the years when he had a chance to leave Johnson C. Smith, whose campus is located on Beatties Ford Road only a mile outside of uptown Charlotte. Said Joyner in a 2023 interview with The Charlotte Observer: “When I look at Clarence ‘Big House’ Gaines up in Winston-Salem and what he has meant to the city, the impact he had…. That was my role model. And I’m hoping I’ve had somewhat of a (similar) legacy here in Charlotte.”

It stands to reason that Joyner’s longtime assistant coach, Mark Sherrill, will at least get an interview for the job. Sherrill is a J.C. Smith alum and one of the top scorers the program has ever produced.

Joyner didn’t rule out coaching again. He said he was in “good health and still has gas in the tank.” His son, Steve Joyner Jr., is a high school athletic director at West Charlotte, and Joyner Sr. said he would live in Charlotte where almost all of his family is located, no matter what the future holds.