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The family of a longtime Triangle girls’ basketball coach is raising money to start a scholarship for Durham students in her honor.
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Sheremy Gwenette Dillard, a recovery teacher at Felton Grove High School in Apex, was set to start her second season as girls basketball head coach when Raleigh police said Aug. 14 they had found her fatally stabbed, The News & Observer reported. Her boyfriend, Rickey Harper, 60, was arrested in Pennsylvania and faces a charge of first-degree murder.
Dillard, 57, was the Apex school’s first head coach after it opened in 2025. She played a similar role at Carrboro High School, where she became the school’s first girls’ basketball head coach in 2007.
Bernard Dillard, her brother, set up a GoFundMe on his family’s behalf Monday to raise $5,000 for the “Coach Sheremy G. Dillard Scholarship Fund.” The intent is to create a permanent and annual scholarship meant to benefit students in Durham, Sheremy Dillard’s hometown.
The family will set up a joint “dedicated, recurring” account with the Durham Public Schools Foundation, Bernard Dillard wrote. The campaign had received two donations and raised $800 as of Wednesday afternoon.
Sheremy Dillard played basketball at Hillside High School in Durham, graduating in 1987, according to her obituary. She then played for the women’s basketball team at North Carolina Central University and graduated in 1992 with her bachelor’s degree in physical education.
So the scholarship will go to a graduating female senior at Hillside High School who plans to attend a historically Black college or university and major in physical education “to pursue a lifelong career in coaching and teaching” — students who follow in Sheremy Dillard’s footsteps, Bernard Dillard wrote.
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Sheremy Dillard was born in Durham and grew up in the Forestview Heights neighborhood, according to ABC11, The N&O’s newsgathering partner. Her family has deep ties to Durham: her grandfather, Samuel Dillard, founded Dillard’s Grocery Store, later Dillard’s Bar-B-Q before it closed in 2011, in the Hayti District.
Sheremy Dillard began her coaching career in 1993 when she returned to Hillside as a physical education teacher, according to her obituary. Dillard was an assistant coach for Hillside women’s varsity basketball and helped lead the school to a state championship in 1996.
That year, Dillard moved south, coaching K-12 and college teams in Alabama and Louisiana for seven years. She came back to Durham in 2003 to teach and coach at Neal Middle School for a year before another three-year stint coaching at Hillside. In 2007, she got her first high school head coaching job at Carrboro, leading the Jaguars for 17 years and winning the Northern Lakes Athletic Conference Coach of Year in 2023.
In serving over three decades as a teacher and coach, Dillard was described as a “warm demander,” her obituary read.
“Sheremy relentlessly encouraged her students to be where they want to be,” the obituary read. “She was a mentor, teacher, motivator, and coach.”
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This story was originally published August 26, 2026 at 4:06 PM.