Western Carolina alum and a member of the WCU Athletics Hall of Fame through the 1996 Southern Conference Championship men’s basketball team, Martin Unger returned to his alma mater in August 2023 to join the Catamount Club staff as an Assistant Director of Development.
Unger has spent his career working in both higher and secondary education, serving the past seven years as a school counselor and teacher between the Gastonia, Rowan-Salisbury, and Charlotte-Mecklenburg school districts. He returned to Cullowhee after five years as the school counselor at Myers Park High in Charlotte, mentoring students and aiding in class scheduling and college counseling.
In addition to his work in education, Unger also has an athletics background as a basketball coach. His most recent stint was at North Rowan High School as the head varsity boys' basketball coach. He guided the NRHS program to a conference tournament championship back in 2018.
Unger’s first full-time coaching position came at Nicholls State in Thibodaux, La., where he also served as the program’s recruiting coordinator in 2006-07. That led to an assistant coaching position at the University of Missouri at Kansas City where he spent five years. During his time on staff, Unger helped recruit and coached the program’s all-time leading rebounder and was a part of the team’s third-best overall record in school history in the 2010-11 season.
In 2012, Unger returned to North Carolina as the associate head coach at Belmont Abbey College where he was a part of the 2013 Conference Carolinas championship and berth in the NCAA Division II national tournament. He was promoted to the program’s head coach in August 2014 where he spent two seasons before his career took him to secondary education. Unger mentored a 2015 NABC All-State Good Works Team recipient Justin Kuhlman, with his squad receiving the 2015-16 Men’s Basketball Messick Award for Sportsmanship for Conference Carolinas. Three of his players collected Academic All-Conference honors under his tutelage.
During his time at Belmont Abbey, Unger was heavily involved with the college alumni and donors in helping with fundraising projects for the men’s basketball program.
Unger began his coaching career as a student assistant while an undergraduate in Cullowhee. He parlayed that experience into a director of basketball operations position at the University of Richmond under head coach John Beilein, working with a Spiders program that advanced to the NCAA tournament in 1998 and the NIT in 2001. His intercollegiate experience also includes five years at Florida State as the video coordinator and assistant recruiting coordinator before catching on at Nicholls State in 2006.
Unger is a 1997 graduate of Western Carolina with a Bachelor of Arts in sociology. He and his wife Heather Kepley Unger – also a 1997 WCU graduate and member of the Catamount women’s golf team and Phi Mu sorority – have four children. His eldest daughter Kelsey graduated from WCU in 2022; daughter Katherine who is enrolled at Liberty University; and sons Carson and Cody.
