There is a championship game on August 29, and Charlotte has a team in it.
Decent chance that is the first you are hearing about it, and that is not a knock on you. Two weeks ago this paper ran a story under the headline "There's a Pro Basketball Team Winning in Charlotte Right Now. Meet the Crown." The entire point of that piece was the introduction. Here is a women's professional basketball team, they play down at Bojangles Coliseum, they are very good, and almost nobody in this city knows they exist.
Introductions are over.
Wednesday night the Charlotte Crown beat the Savannah Steel, and that did it. The UpShot League is in its first season, so the title game it will play on August 29 in Jacksonville is the first one it has ever held, and your Crown are in it.
Now, the format, because it explains why Wednesday mattered. The top two teams from the regular season play for the trophy. Nobody else, no bracket, no play-in round. Jacksonville is 20-6 and sitting on top of the league. Charlotte is 17-10, and the league's own release says the win over Savannah locked the Crown mathematically into the other spot with seven games still on the schedule.
Here is the number that explains how they got there. Over the past month, Charlotte is 10-1.
Ten and one. Run the subtraction on the rest of the season and you find a team that was 7-9 before this stretch started. Nine losses in the first half of a season, one loss in the last month, same coliseum, same league, same uniforms. Something turned over in July and it has not turned back.
And here is the thing. The opponent waiting in that title game is the same Jacksonville Waves squad the Crown hung 105 points on three days before they clinched. That was Sunday at Bojangles Coliseum, a 105-73 win that set an UpShot League record for points in a regulation game. One game does not decide a title. It does tell you Charlotte is not going to Jacksonville hoping to hang around.
Now, about this roster.
Deja Kelly leads the UpShot League in points. Deja Kelly also leads the UpShot League in assists. Nobody else in this league is doing both. Schaquilla Nunn leads it in rebounds and in blocks, and on July 30 against Greensboro she put up 24 points and 15 rebounds in the same ballgame, which is the kind of line that used to get a player on the eleven o'clock highlights back when this city still had a proper sports segment.
Four statistical categories. Two players. One team, and that team is ours.
And if you need one more piece of evidence that this league is real, it came on July 31, when Michelle Onyiah signed with the Indiana Fever. FIRST player in UpShot League history to earn a WNBA contract, and she earned it over twenty-one games in a Crown uniform. A brand new league produced a WNBA player in its debut season. She came off this roster, in this city.
So here is where it stands. The title game is August 29 at VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville, which happens to be the Waves' town. Charlotte will have to go down there and take it on somebody else's map. Fine. Given what happened Sunday, I like our chances considerably more than a 17-10 team has any right to like them against a 20-6 team.
Before any of that, there is basketball left to play. Seven regular season games remain, six of them at Bojangles Coliseum, and the next one is Saturday at 4 p.m. against Savannah. A Saturday afternoon in August, three Saturdays before this team plays for a trophy.
You have met them. Go watch them.