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GREENSBORO — Most of the players on the Guilford College men's basketball team came from high school gyms in tiny North Carolina towns.

Coach Tom Palombo and his staff look for guys who fall short of a Division I or II NCAA program but have smarts and the stuff that granddads call "character."

With a little polish they become stronger players and go from boys to men.

"I think our number one goal is to have kids who are willing to sacrifice for the team," said Palombo, who is in his seventh year as the Quakers' coach. "But if we win a lot of games, that's great."

By that logic, times must be good at Guilford College.

The Quakers have an 88-17 record since 2006. The school has the second-highest winning percentage (84 percent) among North Carolina teams over that same time. Only UNC is higher, at 86 percent.

Guilford could probably even compete well against some Triad Division I programs.

"We like to think that," said Clay Henson, a 6-foot-2 senior guard from Glen Alpine who drives the Quakers this season with seniors Rhett Bonner and Tyler Sanborn.

Guilford has one loss this season and is coming off a third-place finish in the NCAA Division tournament last year.

But nobody's talking yet about a deep championship run again.

They're ranked sixth in the nation, according to D3hoops.com, and on Saturday beat the only team they have lost to this season.

Guilford (14-1, 5-1) put the pressure on ODAC rival Virginia Wesleyan College (14-2, 5-2) with a full-court press in the first half and pulled away to a 71-56 victory.

"Those guys, they talk a lot of smack," Sanborn said of the Virginia Beach team, ranked eighth nationally by D3hoops.com. "But we're not allowed to be unsportsmanlike."

Tipoff happened in a gym where a Star Spangled Banner hangs beside a United Nations flag, and on a day in which students honored Palombo by wearing fake mustaches.

The teams swapped the lead through a fast-break first half that ended 38-34, Guilford.

In the second half, Guilford guards often found Sanborn, who led the team with 21 points and 15 rebounds. Bonner and Henson combined to add 27 more.

With 11 minutes left, Sanborn hit a low-post hook for a 10-point lead — the largest of the game — and the win became more certain.

The crowd hollered and the players jumped, but there was little showboating beyond that.

"I think, in the second half, we were playing our game," Sanborn said.

The foundation of the team rests primarily upon the quiet, confident play of Bonner, Henson and Sanborn.

"Between the three of us," Bonner said, "we know that in any game any one of us could be hot."

Bonner, from Yadkinville, plays an all-around solid game at guard after transferring from Presbyterian College following his freshman year. Henson swaps with center Sanborn as the team's highscorer from game to game.

Sanborn is a 6-9 beast inside and a key cog in the system Palombo runs. It wasn't that way when he arrived on campus, though, Palombo said.

"If you saw film of him as a freshman and watched him now, you wouldn't recognize him," Palombo said.

In high school, Sanborn said, he got by on being the big guy.

"I didn't have to work hard," he said.

But that didn't fly at Guilford. He had to drop weight and work on fundamentals.

"You have to work hard to play here," he said. "My work ethic changed."

The proof: Sanborn scored the 1,000th point of his Quakers career in Wednesday's 99-57 victory over Emory & Henry.

There isn't room for a freshman superstar in the program. The ODAC is too tough to field a team without experience, Palombo said. As of Friday, four teams in the conference were ranked in the top 25 Division III schools according to D3hoops.com.

But over four years of work, Palombo and his staff put the shine on the boys.

Now they'll have to work harder through the thick of conference play and a three-game homestand.

And even among the three, they'll split the workload.

Contact Gerald Witt at 373-7008 or gerald.witt@news-record.com