On Tuesday night, the Green Level men’s basketball team pulled off its largest win of the 2025-26 season, knocking off Apex Friendship on the road, 52-47.
The Patriots entered the game with a perfect 16-0 record and were ranked No. 2 in the Class 8A RPI rankings, according to MaxPreps.
Green Level head coach John Green says a lot went into pulling off the big upset, especially the aggressive effort on defense.
“We guarded the three-point line really well,” Green said. “They didn’t make a single three in the first half, which is rare. And they probably won’t do that the next time we play them.”
Apex Friendship was only able to put up two shot attempts from beyond the arc in the first 16 minutes of the game.
On the offensive side of the ball, senior Andrew Schall led the Gators with 24 points, shooting 9-for-15 (60%) from the floor. It’s his fourth 20-point game this season. Last week, Schall put up a career-high 29 points in a win against Jordan.
After a rough start to the season, the men’s team is getting hot at the right time. Tuesday’s upset marked the fourth-straight conference win for the Gators. Despite being just 5-10 overall this season, Green Level is now 4-2 in the Quad City 7 Conference.
“We had a really hard non-conference schedule,” Green said. “Playing some of the top teams in the state of North Carolina, and even some from Virginia, we took some lumps early on, but we’re playing a lot better now. We’re coming together as a team, and trusting each other.” Green added that the early losses to strong opponents only help his team prepare for the second half of the season.
“I’m hoping we continue to get better and buy into one another,” he said. “You can really lose a team after losing a few games, and it can go downhill, and the locker room can start fighting each other, but these guys have bought in.”
Coach Green knows what it’s like to go through a tough stretch of losses.
In the first two years as a program, the men’s basketball team at Green Level failed to win a game. They lost every single one. A record of 0-25 in the 2019-20 season, and 0-13 during a COVID-shortened season in 2020-21. The very first win in program history came in the third year as a program on November 23, 2021 against Research Triangle. The Gators finished 12-14 that season, and the freshmen that year bought in. After that came the first winning season, going 19-9. Then a combined record of 55-7 over the next two years, with two straight trips to the Class 4A East regional semifinals for those freshmen who became seniors.
But with a talented group from last year’s team now gone, this team had a big challenge at the start of the season.
“They had some really big shoes to fill,” Green said. “That initial expectation, when we lost a game, it really knocked us back a couple of steps. But finally, we’ve been able to gather ourselves.”
He notes that it’s been fun to see the excitement from his players after winning these last three games, and seeing them cheer and celebrate each other.
Green and the team are now hoping the fans will also cheer and celebrate the Gators.
“It’s a real tough conference from top to bottom, but I’d like to say we have some sort of home-court advantage, but it’s going to be extremely tough to keep getting wins.”
Coach is inviting Green Level students, parents, and fans to ignore the overall record and realize that this team is coming together at the right time.
“It certainly means a lot to have a large student body at games,” Green said. “We just played at Apex Friendship, who was undefeated, and their student section was not as big as it should be for a ranked team.”
“Hopefully, our fans and students will start showing up after final exams are done. But we need to keep playing better and winning games, and hopefully that will motivate people to show up.”
The next home game for the men’s basketball team is January 23 – the Friday of final exams week. It will be a women’s/men’s non-conference doubleheader against Cleveland High School. After that, the Gators will return to QC7 action, with four of their final six regular-season games at The Swamp.
Green says the goal for this year’s team, despite the slow start, is to make it to the Class 8A playoffs.
The opportunity is there.
The top 24 teams in the state, according to the MaxPreps RPI rankings, make the postseason. Green Level currently sits at 25th.
