Head Coach - Women's Basketball, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Courtney Banghart enters her seventh season at the helm of the UNC women’s basketball program, who has transformed the Tar Heel roster and led the team to NCAA Tournament appearances in each of the past five seasons, with a Sweet 16 appearance in 2022 and 2025.
- Banghart was announced on April 30. 2019, as North Carolina’s fourth head women’s basketball coach, and the first new face in the position since 1986. She came to Chapel Hill after 12 years as the head coach at Princeton, where her teams won seven Ivy League crows and made eight NCAA Tournament appearances. (Before her arrival, Princeton hadn’t reached the tournament even once.)
- A New Hampshire native, Banghart was a three-year starter at Dartmouth, where she twice earned All-Ivy honors. She drained a then-Ivy League record in career three-pointers (273) and as a senior competed in the three-point shooting contest at Butler’s Hinkle Fieldhouse during the men’s Final Four in Indianapolis.
- Including a WNIT appearance at Princeton, Banghart has led her teams to 14 postseason appearances in 18 seasons as a head coach.
- In July of 2023 she began a two-year term as president of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association (WBCA).
- She was the 2015 Naismith National Coach of the Year and is the only current ACC coach to have won that honor.
- A player she coached was picked in the top 10 in back-to-back WNBA Drafts (Stephanie Watts from UNC 10th in 2021, Bella Alarie from Princeton 5th in 2020)
- In 2015 she was named to Fortune’s list of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders. Also on the list that year: Pope Francis, Bill and Melinda Gates, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., LeBron James, Elon Musk and Taylor Swift.
- She holds a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience and a master’s degree in writing and leadership, both from Dartmouth. Her graduate thesis was on sport leadership.
- She hitchhiked through Alaska after college (after ditching the outdoor leadership course in which she was enrolled) and has bungeed off a jump in Switzerland that was then the highest in the world.
- Right around the time she got the Princeton job, she and her brother were finalists to appear on “The Amazing Race.”
- A four-time soccer state champion in high school, she planned to play that sport at Dartmouth until a coaching change made her rethink her path and talk the women’s basketball coach into giving her a spot. (She also won two high school state titles in basketball and three in tennis.)
