University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Busy Week for Williams
December 27, 2004 | Men's Basketball
Dec. 27, 2004
By Adam Lucas
Like thousands of other Tar Heel fans, Roy Williams will kick off a busy Carolina-related week with tomorrow night's home game against UNC-Wilmington. Unlike most of those fans, he'll need a bit of air power to complete all his plans.
His basketball Heels return to the hardwood after a week's layoff tomorrow night against the Seahawks. They'll practice Wednesday, and then Williams--who has made a habit of taking in other UNC sports in his 20 months at the helm of the basketball program--plans to go to Charlotte on Thursday to watch the Continental Tire Bowl.
He won't get to take in the whole game, as the basketball team's pregame meal begins four hours before tipoff at the Carolina Club. But he'll definitely be there contributing to the blue-clad sea at kickoff. A friend of the program is providing an airplane to fly the coach from Charlotte to Chapel Hill and enable him to see as much of the football game as possible.
"I'm going to stay at the bowl game as long as I can," he said. "Then I'm going to leave in time to get back here for the pregame meal. At the end of my time as an assistant here, Coach Smith had stopped going to pregame meals. I'm not at that stage yet. I still feel comfortable there and feel like I can accomplish several things in terms of setting the mood.
"But I'm hopeful I can at least watch the first half...It's something I'm really excited about for the football team and staff and I hear the weather is going to be great, so why the heck would you not want to go to the game?"
Before he switches his attention to football, however, he's got a few basketball-related items to attend to. Carolina went through their first practice in five days Sunday night at the Smith Center, but the team fell victim to some of the usual holiday travel delays. C.J. Hooker missed practice because of the ice storm in Greenville, Byron Sanders missed the first half of practice because of a flight delay, and Marvin Williams was coming off a nine-hour flight from his home near Seattle.
The coaching staff discouraged players from playing any pickup games during their time off, the first time for many players they haven't played a game in several months. In other words, it wasn't Carolina's crispest practice of the season.
"You can't get in shape in three or four days but you can do a lot to get out of shape," said the head coach, who identified box-out effort on rebounding as one of his primary concerns this week. "The one thing I always try to do at the first practice back is not make the kids feel like we're trying to kill them. I want to make sure they feel like we're trying to teach and get the opportunity to go up and down a few times."
With three games in the next six days--Wilmington on Tuesday, Cleveland State on Thursday, and William & Mary on Sunday--they'll have plenty of chances to go up and down. But those will be game environments, which means the practice time Williams values so highly won't be in abundance.
Still, he'll take advantage of some of the final nonconference contests of the year (after Sunday's game, the only non-league foe left on the schedule is Connecticut) to tweak a few things about his Tar Heels. And although he doesn't want to slight any of this week's opponents, he'll also try to incorporate some of the things the Heels might have worked on if they'd had more practice time.
"It does allow you to try some new things because teams don't know you as well as the teams in the league," Williams said. "I'm also concerned with getting Quentin [Thomas] a few more minutes. I'd like to get him over 10 minutes per game. That's extremely important to us. We have to pretend they are extremely difficult practices and try to get better as a basketball team in every area."
Notes: Raymond Felton's wrist injury continues to heal. "It's better than it was," Williams said. "The doctors told us three weeks ago that we had about a six-week time period to get through."...During Dean Smith's tenure as head coach, UNC had a policy against playing non-conference in-state schools. So far, Williams hasn't adopted that same philosophy. "I guess you could say I'm open about it," he said. "I haven't been here long enough to form an opinion...We have so many schools (in this state) we could probably make a non-conference schedule and never play anyone outside of the consolidated University."...Despite that approach, UNC-Wilmington probably wouldn't be on the schedule if they hadn't agreed to play the Tar Heels in Myrtle Beach last year for Raymond Felton's "home" game. The same is true for Thursday night opponent Cleveland State, which served as the home game for Jawad Williams last year.
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly and can be reached at alucas@tarheelmonthly.com. His book on Roy Williams's first season at Carolina, Going Home Again, is now available in bookstores. To subscribe to Tar Heel Monthly or learn more about the book, click here.
