Former Shaw AD Alfonza Carter, 73, built an HBCU powerhouse in downtown Raleigh

It felt weird talking about Alfonza Carter over the phone, Marcus Clarke said on the other end of the line from Charlotte, because that was the one thing he’d never do. Carter, the longtime Shaw athletic director, coach and administrator who died Wednesday at 73, was a master of interpersonal communication, with the emphasis on personal.

“There’s a lot he taught me, but Al Carter did not teach me how to make a phone call,” Clarke, who took over for Carter as athletic director in 2012 and is now a senior associate commissioner at the CIAA, said. “He walked everywhere on campus to have a touchpoint and conversation. You don’t appreciate that sometimes, but the relationships, and the way he made people feel going about doing their jobs, I really appreciate and cherish that.

“He was just that kind of person. You don’t spend that long at an institution and not build relationships, but the way I saw him maintain those, the time I was there, groundskeepers and bus drivers and people in the business office, it was always the same conversation. He had to get in front of you and he’d have a conversation. How he did business might have been the old-school way of doing it, but you learn to appreciate it.”

The broad scope of Carter’s legacy, and what he meant to the HBCU that sits just south of the core of downtown Raleigh in his almost 40 years there and two stints as athletic director, is almost impossible to describe. With that face-to-face approach, Carter took over a resource-starved athletic department that had a single photocopier and turned it into an CIAA – and national – powerhouse in multiple sports. He brought back football after several decades away and put that program not only on a sound financial footing but gave it a platform for immediate success.

And even after he retired from Shaw entirely in 2020, he and his wife Melinda were still fixtures at every kind of athletic event as they had been when he was working – technically, an alum solely by honorary degree, but as emotionally invested in the Bears’ success and athletes as anyone who spent four years on campus.

“It wasn’t in a very good place when he took over,” said broadcaster Donal Ware, who now hosts an HBCU-focused radio show but also worked in sports information at Shaw and spent several years as the school’s football and basketball radio announcer. “Having been there for the three years under him and having seen Shaw evolve, if you go from that to winning a national championship, you’re talking about a small HBCU winning a national championship, that’s big. All the football championships, that was him.”

Carter, was an all-American basketball player at North Carolina A&T after growing up in Martinsville, Va., and went almost immediately into coaching after graduation. He arrived at Shaw in 1980 to coach women’s basketball, and would also coach men’s basketball before becoming athletic director in 1991, which is where he had his greatest impact.

He brought back Jacques Curtis, a former Shaw women’s basketball assistant coach, as head coach in 2000. Twelve years later, that program won a Division II national title and has won nine CIAA titles. A former Shaw tennis coach himself, he hired Sunday Enitan to coach that sport, now a CIAA dynasty on both the men’s and women’s sides and the first CIAA tennis program to ever host an NCAA regional.

And he restarted Shaw’s long-dormant football program, taking a cautious, patient approach that included a year as a club sport. That team won the CIAA in its second year as a full varsity program, its first of four in six years, among the 33 CIAA titles, seven NCAA regional championships and four HBCU national championships Shaw won during Carter’s first tenure as AD to go with the women’s basketball NCAA title in 2012.

After the women’s magical NCAA run, Carter moved into university administration as vice president of administrative services and also served as director of admissions and dean of students while returning for a second term as athletic director from 2015-20 (and six more CIAA titles).

A memorial will be held Monday night at Shaw’s Boyd Chapel, one final visit to the campus Carter loved and served for the majority of his life.

“It’s not Shaw athletics without knowing where Dr. Carter’s at, or when’s the last time you talked to Dr. Carter?” Clarke said. “He was such a presence for so long, it’s odd him not being present at something that’s happening at Shaw. Dr. Carter went nowhere far. He was always plugged in. That was his thing.”

A member of the CIAA, Shaw and North Carolina A&T halls of fame, Carter had often declined opportunities to go on Ware’s radio show, BoxToRow, but in 2020, Ware figured he’d want to look back at his 40 years at Shaw upon the occasion of his retirement.

“He didn’t want the spotlight,” Ware said. “I tried to have him on my show when he retired and he ducked me. He ducked me! But that’s the point. He didn’t want the accolades. He just wanted to do the job and he did an incredible job. After what he had done for all those years, not only athletics but the university as a whole, the CIAA as a whole, I wanted to put the light on that nationally, but he ducked me. That’s who he was. That’s who he was.”

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