Basketball season was still weeks away, and his first official year as Waynesville’s head boys coach was just beginning to take shape.
So was chemo.
“It’s been definitely an interesting year for many reasons,” Philpot said. “Dealing with my health, finding out in the middle of October that I had cancer, going through chemo early in the season.
“It was definitely tough.”
What followed wasn’t just a winning streak or a shiny record for Philpot and the Spartans. It was a community learning how to carry something heavy together — and a team learning how to keep its coach’s spirits up by giving him something else to hold onto.
Philpot said basketball became a lifeline in the middle of treatments, something that kept his attention and helped him stay focused on “where we wanted to go, what we wanted to do and what we wanted to be.”
He leaned on family. He leaned on assistants. And he leaned on a group of players that, in his words, “handled it awesome.”
The results have been almost impossible to separate from the emotion.
Waynesville enters tournament time at 20-2, riding an 18-game winning streak following a 2-2 start that included fourth-quarter collapses against two respected Southwestern Buckeye League programs — Bellbrook and Brookville — in contests where the Spartans led by seven entering the final period.
Philpot still remembers the feeling.
“I was really concerned with some things,” he said. “There’s two games that we felt like we let slip away.
“Otherwise, we could possibly be 22-0.”
But that early hiccup also came with a second layer — a first-time head basketball coach learning the job on the fly. Philpot has coached other sports as a head coach and was a longtime assistant.
This was different, and he admitted it.
“You’re in a head coaching role when you’re standing up rather than when you’re on the bench giving advice as an assistant,” Philpot said. “I’ve grown since the beginning of the season. It’s been a process.”
Somewhere in the middle, Waynesville took off and orchestrated the kind of run that makes a gym feel smaller and a town feel louder.
And on Jan. 12, Philpot marked a milestone that had nothing to do with the basketball court.
He rang the bell.
He finished treatments and said the results showed he was doing well, with another checkup scheduled for April and continued monitoring beyond that.
The next night, Waynesville beat Valley View 86-79. Philpot doesn’t expect to forget that combination of moments.
“It was really special for our community,” Philpot said. “And our student section has just been amazing. They travel well. They do all the things that high school sports are about.”
If the season has had a theme, it’s been that nothing has separated — the basketball from the people, the wins from the support, the coach from the town.
Philpot calls it “a comeback story” for many reasons, and he doesn’t try to hide how much the opportunity has meant.
“I appreciate that I was given this chance by our administration,” Philpot said. “I feel like they’ve really been super supportive of me.
“Obviously winning helps.”
He also talks about the faces behind the support — his parents, his brother, his wife, his kids and his stepson, who has served as the team’s water boy.
He said it’s “nice to look up in the stands and just see them.”
“It’s really special,” Philpot added. “We just don’t want it to end.”
Echoes of the early-2000s
Waynesville basketball doesn’t have to reach too far into its past to find the last time the program felt like the center of the state.
That’s because Philpot — along with current assistant Todd Cook — was there for it.
During the 2000-01 season, they served as assistant coaches under Brandon’s father and Waynesville hall of famer, Jim Philpot, when the Spartans went 17-8 and made the deepest OHSAA tournament run in program history — a ride that included postseason wins over Greeneview, East Clinton, Versailles and Ripley before losing to Fenwick 68-62 in the regional semifinals.
That team entered the school’s Hall of Fame last year.
Jim Philpot, a name that still carries weight in the community, was recognized in the Waynesville Hall of Fame list of special inductees in 2006 for his ties to being the State of Ohio Division III Coach of the Year and leading an Associated Press No. 1-ranked Division III team.
Jim Philpot is still offering his words of wisdom.
“He’s at every game,” Brandon said. “He gives me feedback. He comes in the locker room to talk to the kids. He just means so much to Waynesville.”
If this season has reconnected Waynesville to its best basketball memories, the connection runs through the Sesslar family more than any other.
Scott Sesslar was on that 2000-01 tournament team. Now, his son, Zevin Sesslar, is the senior point guard at the center of Philpot’s current group — and the one Philpot calls the “floor general.”
It’s part of why Philpot hesitates when asked to compare eras and admits how hard it is not to.
“There’s just a lot of similarities between the two teams,” he said.
Philpot brings up the symmetry that feels almost scripted. Jim Philpot was the same age Brandon is now when he took over as a first-time head coach.
Jim Philpot spent roughly two decades as an assistant before stepping into the role. Brandon followed a winding coaching path of his own — and is now enjoying his first year as a head basketball coach with his father in the stands.
Then he goes deeper into the makeup.
Philpot describes that 2000-01 team as a “total team effort” with depth, defined roles and a brand of basketball that fits what Waynesville is doing now — a four-out, dribble-drive concept mixed with pace, defensive pressure and togetherness.
“You had a lot of depth on that team,” he described. “The culture is so similar.”
He can still rattle off names from that run.
Matt Letts played point guard, quick enough to get anywhere he wanted and distributed the ball at a high level. Junior Castle was a senior who did the “dirty work” defensively. Shooters like Andy Whipp and Chris Jones. A sophomore sixth man, Kellen Shank, who later became a 1,000-point scorer and a Hall of Fame inductee.
Then Philpot pivots from memory to present, lining up the similarities like a coach diagramming a set.
Sesslar, he said, is doing things that remind him of Letts — the pace, the command, the distribution. Castle’s defensive identity reminds him of current standout Lucas Rocha, whom Philpot said “wreaks havoc on their best players.”
And then there’s the depth. Where that 2000-01 group had Shank as a young sixth man, this Waynesville team has Griffin Armstrong, a junior who came off the bench and scored 21 in a grueling overtime win over Edgewood this past weekend.
Even the numbers point to style. Philpot said the team is shooting around 38% from 3-point range. He said people have marveled at the ball movement, including a postgame interview after the Edgewood victory where he was told the Spartans have piled up 370 assists on 541 made field goals this season.
It’s tempting, in a small-town gym, to let that history start telling you what comes next.
Philpot won’t go that far — not yet.
“I’m not going to say that until we go a little further,” the coach humbly said. “But this team certainly is special.”
The formula for 18-straight wins
The streak is real. Waynesville doesn’t pretend it isn’t.
Philpot actually likes that his program has leaned into it.
“A lot of coaches don’t want to,” Philpot said. “We kind of just talked a lot about it. We want to continue the streak. Let’s keep the streak going. We’re not going to hide from it.”
Waynesville’s 18 straight wins have come from a formula that doesn’t look like the one people assume when they see relentless pace late into games.
Philpot said he often gets asked how his players can play so fast, hard, pressing the whole time — even though they don’t play a deep rotation.
He said Waynesville typically sends seven or eight kids out on the court during games, and that Sesslar and Rocha rarely come off the floor except for brief rest or foul trouble.
Then comes the detail Philpot seems proudest of. They haven’t run sprints in practice. Not a single one.
“That tells you they play so hard in practice and all the drills,” Philpot said. “We don’t have to because we know they’re getting their conditioning in.”
It’s also why the final week of the regular season became a test Philpot welcomed, even as it drained his team.
Waynesville went to Oakwood — “The Pit,” as Philpot called it — and won a Friday night game that delivered the league title outright. Philpot said the environment is tough, the gym is tough, and doing it on the road mattered.
“We jokingly said, ‘Let’s be selfish here,’” Philpot recalled. “We wanted it outright.”
Then came Edgewood, the kind of opponent that turns a Friday-night high into Saturday-night survival.
Philpot said he could see in warmups that his team’s legs were a little tired, and that they weren’t playing as fast as normal. Waynesville ended up needing overtime after giving up a buzzer-beater.
And that’s where Philpot said his seniors showed him the core of the team.
When he went to the bench frustrated by the week’s grind and the sudden overtime, he said his players didn’t panic.
“They were like, ‘Hey, the seniors stepped up, so we’re good. We’ve been here before,’” Philpot said.
Waynesville consists of five seniors this season, and he tied their leadership directly to the kind of veteran-led backbone the program had in 2000-01. Different names, but same tone.
He also pointed to something else — Waynesville is small, but it defends big.
“They rotate, they scramble,” Philpot said. “They do all the things that a defensive coach loves to see.”
Now, the conversation shifts, as it always does, to March. Philpot doesn’t overcomplicate it. He said his message has been consistent all year — and even simpler now.
“We don’t care about a stat. We don’t care who scores,” Philpot said. “We don’t care about anything except the win-loss record.
“Survive and advance. It doesn’t matter if we win by 20 or if we win by one.”
Top-seed Waynesville opens its postseason journey Thursday against Stivers, and Philpot said the “season’s over” in the sense that a new one starts — the one where streaks don’t protect you and records don’t carry you.
But the emotional current underneath it isn’t hard to hear. Waynesville has a coach who rang the bell in January, a student section that has turned road trips into home atmospheres, a father in the stands watching his son do the job he once did and a program staring at a mirror that looks a lot like the early 2000s.
And through all of it, Philpot keeps coming back to the same closing thought — gratitude and a wish that the season keeps giving him and Waynesville one more game.
“It’s amazing, the support that we’re getting,” Philpot said. “It’s really special — and we just don’t want it to end.”
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