Lucas: Frederick Enjoying Coaching Role

By Adam Lucas

Brad Frederick picked a good time to go back on the recruiting trail.

After four seasons as Carolina's director of operations, Frederick moved into an assistant coaching role this spring when C.B. McGrath accepted the head coaching job at UNC-Wilmington. That meant Frederick was back in high school gyms as a member of the newly minted national championship coaching staff.

"I saw (Villanova's) Jay Wright at the very first event I went to this spring," Frederick said. "He talked about what an unbelievable accomplishment it was to get all the way back. That was what I heard the most from other coaches, about being able to go to back to back national championship games and finishing the job this time."

It didn't take long for Frederick to get fully immersed in building the 2017-18 roster—and beyond. He spent numerous weeks this summer criss-crossing the country on the prep recruiting circuit.

It had been a long wait. Carolina fans might still think of him as the walk-on who played in Dean Smith's final season and Bill Guthridge's first two years, but Frederick had established terrific coaching credentials at Vanderbilt. By the time he left Nashville for Chapel Hill in 2013, he was the longest-tenured assistant in the Southeastern Conference.

But during his 14 seasons as a Vanderbilt assistant coach, Frederick always remembered advice he received from Guthridge when the player departed Chapel Hill. Frederick knew he wanted to get into coaching. But he also loved Carolina and it was difficult to leave. As he prepared to accept the job with the Commodores, Guthridge told him, "Go work for someone else. And hopefully, you'll have the chance to come back to Chapel Hill."

That's why he was willing to temporarily give up scouting and recruiting responsibilities for the UNC operations job. "When Coach Williams called me about replacing Coach (Joe) Holladay, there was a part of me that thought, 'Is it a step backwards?'" Frederick said. "But I always wanted to get back to Carolina and I always wanted to work for Coach Williams. An assistant coaching job at Carolina is better than a lot of Division I head coaching jobs."

Williams' staff has evolved over his time in Chapel Hill. When he returned to Carolina, there was some consternation that he had no former Tar Heels on the bench. Now, Frederick joins a staff with deep ties to the school, including Frederick and Hubert Davis in assistant coaching roles, Sean May as the director of operations and Eric Hoots as the director of player development.

Along with longtime assistant Steve Robinson, who has been with Williams every season at Carolina, that staff has developed an effective working relationship. Williams is open to input from his coaches, but also has a very firm idea about how he wants to operate. Finding the right niche to make timely suggestions—and being able to handle it if they aren't implemented—is an asset for an assistant coach.

"I was away for so long and spent a lot of time with Coach (Kevin) Stallings and the way he does things," Frederick says. "I've been a part of teams that have run matchup zone and zone and the Princeton offense and we were almost totally dependent on set plays. Those 14 years exposed me to all kinds of different ways to approach the game. Maybe I can bring something that I've seen work elsewhere, and I do think that helps me with scouting, and being familiar with the different ways other teams might try to do things. You have to realize that you might make ten suggestions to Coach Williams, and he might only take one. One of his greatest strengths is his belief in what he's doing and getting the players to believe in it. But that doesn't mean he doesn't want to listen or talk about other ideas."

Even in just four years back on the staff, there's plenty of hardware Frederick could have used to decorate his office. One entire wall is devoted to pictures of every graduating Tar Heel during the Williams era. In an era when not every high school player is chasing a degree, it's hard to miss the message.

"One of our strengths is that people come to school here—like me and like so many other people—and want to stay around," Frederick says. "They love the experience and they don't want to leave. It's some of the best years of their lives, and they want to graduate from the University of North Carolina. Because of the experience they have and the people they meet, this very often becomes a home."

Related Videos