University of North Carolina Athletics
Basketball Media Day in Chapel Hill
October 17, 2003 | Men's Basketball
Oct. 17, 2003
Carolina held its annual men's basketball media day on Thursday. The following is some of what head coach Roy Williams had to say:
After everything that has happened this off-season, how does it feel to finally be on the verge of the season?
"Now I get to be a coach and that's where I really have my most fun anyway, so I'm anxious to get started on Saturday and looking forward to it. When you think about a coaching change, very few people go to a job where they spend as long a time as I had before you start coaching. I came here the week after the Final Four and waited till right now, so that's a long time to be at a place without coaching."
What does it feel like for you today to sit here as the coach of North Carolina?
"You know I hadn't thought of it; that's just being honest. My high school coach says, 'I just don't know if you are happy.' I said jeez, I'm too busy to be happy. You know that kind of thing and I hadn't thought of that specific part of it, I think it will hit me a little bit more Saturday afternoon not tomorrow night, that doesn't necessarily count as practice the way I look at it. I think Saturday afternoon when I walk out on the court it will hit me a little bit at that time. I was fortunate that I was in the building the first game that was played there and had some great moments in there as Coach's [Dean Smith's] assistant, walking out there will be a thrill for me but I don't think that I ever spend too much time worrying about those kinds of things. I am more worried about getting our guys to understand what I want them to learn out there."
Do you have your first thought of the day yet?
"It's always the same for twenty-six years,"It's amazing how much can be accomplished when no one cares who gets the credit." So that was easy, that's the best question I have had today."
What exactly is entailed in Midnight Madness?
"I have no idea. I purposely do that because then that way I don't have to say that I approved any of it. I just tell them, don't tell me. The whole big thing, I have always looked at it as a celebration for the opening of the men's basketball season. The celebration of opening and I want the kids to be seen in a different light. We tried some weird things at Kansas, the kids had fun with it and the people see them not being very graceful, not being very athletic, not being very good at some things. So I think that gives the fans a different look, I think the players enjoy acting a fool. I like that part of it. At Kansas it was something, it more or less set the stage for how we wanted the fans to be involved and that is one of the things I want to do here, I want the fans to be more involved than they have ever been. At Lawrence if I yelled something at a referee, there was a 73-year old lady that sat a few rows behind me, she yelled the same thing I did. I don't want it to just be the students. When people walk into the Smith Center, if there is a CEO of a corporation, I want them to take that CEO hat off and enjoy themselves. I don't expect them to come in there and think that they've got to be entertained, I want them to be part of the evening. I think that's something that I have always felt that Late Night sort of set the tone that we are going to have a lot of fun. I always critiqued their dancing but I never let that have any play on how many minutes they get."
A lot of the publications have you guys in the Top 10, is that realistic at this point, you think?
"It is strange to me, I will answer it in two ways: I don't know if it is realistic or not because I really haven't, until Saturday, I hadn't watched a single tape from last year because I wanted to start everybody with a clean slate. I didn't want everybody to say, 'Well so and so was a bad guy,' or 'so and so was a great defender, or bad attitude, or a great leader.' Good qualities or bad, I really wanted to be able to form my own opinion. I am really looking forward to Saturday so that I can form my own expectations. One magazine called and asked me, and I said the strangest thing to me is that we have lost 36 games the last two years and nobody on the team has ever been to a NCAA tournament game. We only added one freshman, and it's not a cut against Reyshawn but he was second team All-State, and the fans have got to understand that Roy ain't that good. That's probably the bad part about it, they think some miracles are going to happen but I have said before the 36 losses were not Matt Doherty's, it was the North Carolina team and if we win 36 this year, it's not going to be Roy Williams, it's going to be the North Carolina team. It is surprising to be picked that highly."
Don't you think some of that is based on the fact that those players beat your team last year?
"Yeah, but you know it's a season and it's not a weekend. At one point North Carolina was 5-0 and we were 3-3 but I had a heck of a lot better memories at the end of the year, because it is a marathon. If it just depends on how you play on one specific night, on Saturday night in New Orleans we were the best team in the country, when we beat Marquette we were sensational, we were by far the best team, but you know we had to play again on Monday night. So I think that if somebody bases it just on that, to me that would mean that they didn't know very much about basketball. We had Kirk [Hinrich] real banged up, Wayne [Simien] was a little hurt and it was one night. We play one hole, I have a great chance of beating Tiger Woods, but if we play more than one I don't have a very good chance. I can beat anybody on one hole, even some of you guys could beat me on one hole, except Ron [Green Jr. of the Charlotte Observer]."
How is coaching big men changed these days?
"It has changed for me because we don't have very many of them. I have been fortunate the last couple of years, Nick Collison, Drew Gooden, Wayne Simien, those were three number one draft choices, having all three of those guys on the same team at one point. Sean [May] has proven that he can play at this level and be successful, none of the other big guys we have have proven that they can play here and be successful, so it's a big challenge for us to coach those guys. I do think that it is much better to have a big guy that's really good opposed to a little guy that is really good, but both of them need to be good. For me the game has changed a little bit because everybody that's not 7'3 thinks that they need to be a small forward, if they are 7'1 they still think that they want to be a small forward and I think that you have to attack that attitude as any other thing, I don't think as a negative, as that kids want to be coached to be a complete player. Kids don't want to run down there onto the block and never move off the block. That is something that is very comfortable for me to coach and it is something that I have always tried to do, is make them think that they can do a lot of things. But, you are right as that there are not many really top-notch big guys that are in the college game because most of them go to the pros early or go to the pros straight from high school. But you still have guys with size and you got to coach what you have."
How do you take a 6'8 guy and make sure that he does not have the mentality of a small forward?
"Nick Collison was 6'8 or 6'9 and Drew Gooden was 6'8 or 6'9 and they were the 4th player picked and the 12th player picked in two different drafts, but they played inside for us. A guy that plays inside for us is not going to just go down and get in the low-post and never move. For us, even if a guy comes in with those expectations it is not a problem for me cause that's the way that I want to play anyway. So the 6'8, 6'9 guys can play and be productive and still have a lot of opportunities inside."
What have you learned about your players since you were introduced as coach here?
"Not as much as I would like. It is not a dodge of the question, I've just been gone. It is a fact that July is a recruiting period, August I was with the Olympic team, I was gone 26 straight days with the Olympic team, September is a recruiting period and I do all of the home visits. So if one of my assistants goes out, they may come back and the other one may meet me somewhere else. I don't know them nearly as much as I would like and yet I have always thought that that was one of the negatives about the early signing period and early recruiting is that you talk somebody into coming to your school and then they get to school and you say "I'll see you in six weeks' or however long the recruiting period is, because the head coach is gone quite a bit in the fall when they first get there. But, I have been around them some and I got a great staff and I believe in what they tell me how they went through the conditioning period and I have been very pleased about that and I am anxious to get out on the court and see what else."
How do you feel about coming back to the ACC and some of the great rivalries in this league with Duke right down the road, State, and Wake and all those guys?
"It's the rivalries that I grew up with. It took me one game to figure out that Kansas, Missouri was pretty important. But I already know North Carolina-Duke, North Carolina-State, and North Carolina-Wake so it doesn't take me a game to figure that out. I was fortunate to coach in a great conference with great coaches and that is what I am doing again. It is a fact that I have been around a long time, in this area a long time. I had a guy that I went to school with went to school at North Carolina State, my father-in-law went to school at North Carolina State, and so the rivalries are here. He had three daughters and all three daughters went to North Carolina and so I just told him that the second generation got a lot smarter and went from there. This is a great area to have the kind of rivalries that we have, North Carolina and Duke for example, if you go back, that's been one of the best college basketball games or the games with the most interest than any games in the country probably over time. In fact, I think a couple of years back it was voted as the best rivalry in college basketball."
Coming into a new situation with players that you didn't recruit, how do you approach this? What do you bring now that you didn't bring fifteen years ago?
"I was very lucky because my first year at Kansas I brought nothing. Let's be honest, they didn't quite know what my JV record was and sometimes it wasn't that good. Those kids from day one trusted me and gave me a chance and those were the ones that sometimes I'd sit back and almost wonder why they did, but they did and so it worked. I think this year's group, I would ask them to do that if I felt like the need, but they know that we have been pretty successful at Kansas and that I have been in some games and this is not going to be my first practice or my first game, so I think that they have given me a chance already by the respect that they appear to have and I also don't get buried or caught up in those kind of things either. It is not an ego thing with me out on the court, it's just do the job and get better and if I need to scream at you to do it, that's fine or if I need to pat you on the back to do it, that's fine, but I don't go back at the house that night and say boy I did a great job today getting him to bust his tail because I think that it is just something that is going to happen. The one thing that you've got to understand here is that I am really hungry, but as human nature I can't be as hungry as those kids are. There is nobody on our squad that has ever played in the NCAA Tournament. I got to think that they are going to do anything I ask them to do to see if it will work. If it doesn't work then they may have some questions, but I don't have any hesitancy at all about saying that I think these guys will do everything. Jerry Green one time said, 'It's amazing that you get guys to play so hard that they pull the nails out of the floor,' and that's what I want these guys to do. I want them to pull the nails out of the floor, if that's what I ask them to do."
Will you allow Sean to step fully into practice or are you going to try to ease him in just to make sure that his foot doesn't give out again, until you know for sure it's ready?
"A little bit of both. I am going to depend a great deal on Marc [Davis], our trainer, and the medical staff to see what they tell me. The conditioning test last night was pretty difficult and he handled it very well. With these types of injuries I think you always have to be aware, but I also think with Raymond's quad that I've got to be a little bit aware of that. I don't want guys thinking they can get out of practice all the time. It really ticks me off if I walk out there and see guys sitting on the sidelines. We took a lot of pride over fifteen years that our guys practiced everyday. Nick Collison and Ryan Robertson, just two that come to mind, never missed a practice or a game in four years and so I am going to try to instill that kind of pride in our kids here, but again you have to be aware of certain things and you have to be confident that your training staff and medical staff are going to give you good advice."
Having coached against many of these guys last year, at least in one game, how do you feel, with what you do know about them, that their style of play accommodates your coaching style and vice-versa?
"I am not taking too much from that game because they were really good and we were really bad, it is pretty simple, they took better shots, made more of them, got more of them, so I don't know that I take that much from that game necessarily itself. For the last fifteen years I have watched every North Carolina basketball game as a fan, every one of them, I have never watched a North Carolina basketball game pretending that I am the coach. It is a whole different perspective as far as I am concerned, however I do believe that Raymond Felton has a motor that can really push it and that is the way that I want to run. That's what we are going to do. I am facing a battle myself. If you play as fast as I want to play, then that means you play more possessions in a game. The more possessions mean you also have more opportunity for foul trouble and we have no true point guard in the program other than Raymond. They lost Sean last year but were able to cover it up okay with a few other guys, but if you lose a point guard it is hard to cover up for that. The people in Kansas accuse me of saving my timeouts because the other team had scored eight or ten in a row and I'd look down to see if my socks were on straight because I am not calling a timeout. I'd feel like those guys got us in that problem, heck it is your job to get us out. I didn't put us eight down or ten down and so I never called timeouts, but this year if Raymond gives me the tired signal I am going to call a timeout."
Was telling the guys that we will start from a clean slate enough for things to heal or were there other things that you did?
"Every returning player, I brought him in a couple of times, but one time I said, 'What do you think went wrong?' That was the only question that I asked. I felt like maybe it would be good, I don't know whether it came from my psychology courses at Carolina or whatever, to let them have an opportunity to say something. That was the only question I asked and I got a wide variety of answers, but I haven't done anything else about it other than that. I challenged them that if you want to be really good, you have to prepare to be really good and so our conditioning has been difficult, our practices are going to be very difficult, but if you want something really easy and just let me roll the ball out and let you play a little bit, then you need to go somewhere else cause that is not the way I coach. I am not bright enough to figure out shortcuts. The only thing that I can figure out is that it is easier to win the harder you work. So we are going to really work and aren't going to waste anytime on thinking about what went on in the past. I am human, if I feel like they aren't listening to me, I am going to say, 'Hey I didn't lose 36 games in the last two years so you better listen a little bit,' but that's human nature. I am going to try my darnedest not to do that and if I make it through the season without doing that, then I will be very pleased with myself, but my guess is that I won't make it through."
How similar is your system now to the system you left in 1988?
"My first year at Kansas almost every out of bounds play was what I ran here -- offense, defense and everything. With each of those fifteen years that you get removed from the daily practice schedule you try things yourself. Each and every year we changed a little bit and a little bit and a little bit so what it looked like fifteen years later was not exactly what it looked like at the start. That is the way that it will be right now with one exception, the foundation still has to be the same. We are going to try to play very unselfishly, we are going to try to play extremely hard, and we are going to try to play with our brains. Where did I get those? I stole them from the guy whose office is right down the hall. I think that is the foundation of North Carolina basketball and that is what I hope we established as the foundation of Kansas basketball. I said many times, if I am fortunate enough to make it to that coach's graveyard I'd hope that they'd put on that tombstone that his teams played unbelievably hard and that they were unbelievably unselfish. I think the other thing to add to that is just to be intelligent out there. The foundation is still exactly the same. We don't run the same plays or anything like that that we did, but we picked a couple of them up I will say that. There are still a couple of sets that I run that I did my first year at Kansas."
Several years ago Tom Watson was the captain of the Ryder Cup team and he publicly acknowledged the fact that he came and talked to you about putting together a team, can you share with what you told him? Do you feel like you are doing part of what you told him right now?
"It was a great experience for me. I was thrilled that he would have that kind of respect for me and he came and watched us practice and we had a couple of sessions. It was a great day for me that Thursday before they left we went and visited the President on Saturday and then flew over on the Concourse on Sunday. We talked about pairing individuals, some of the matches, and things to talk to them about as a team and Tom gave me a lot of credit. On Sunday morning when I got up to watch the match, it had been late the night before and I think I was gone and so didn't know the results from the night before, the first thing they talked about was the huge victory for John Cook and Chip Beck who had extend the tide and turned the tide for the Americans. That was one of my suggestions, was to put those guys together. So, all of a sudden I got a heck of a lot more nervous than I was when I first started watching it. It was a great thrill for me, but I think that the only difference was that most of those guys had not played on teams. That to me was when the Ryder Cup had really started getting great interest again. These guys have played on a team, but the biggest thing as a fan, which is where I looked at North Carolina over the last fifteen years, was that at times I felt that everybody wasn't headed in the same direction, whether right or wrong. I think that that's the challenge that I've got that was similar to what Tom did was getting everybody to head in the same direction with one goal in mind. That was a great thrill for me and hopefully I'll even have a greater thrill with this bunch."
