University of North Carolina Athletics
Roy Williams Media Day Quotes
October 13, 2005 | Men's Basketball
Oct. 13, 2005
Coach Roy Williams
Thoughts about this year's team
"It's funny because everyone I've talked to over the past couple of weeks has said, 'Well what do you expect?' or 'Are you going to be able to do this?' and 'Do you think this will happen?' I'm being very honest and the answer is 'I don't know' and I think that's what we practice this five weeks for ... My answer to all those questions is very honest, I don't know and we'll find out in the next five weeks.
"I am excited. I like this kind of challenge. I love this kind of challenge if there's some experienced success back on your team. With this many freshmen they need a security blanket. They need a Sean May, a Raymond Felton, a Marvin Williams, somebody like that who's already been through the wars and been very successful. Then those freshmen can get strength from those guys, but we don't really have that ... that's the big question mark. It's my hope that we'll be an unbelievably tough team mentally, that'll we'll be able to play half-court pressure defense and on occasion to be able to pressure and do some other things. I'm hoping that we'll be able to run faster than we did last year and that's going to be my goal starting out.
On if he's ever had a team that was comparable given the number of players lost after last year.
"Never had one. Every year for 15 years at Kansas we'd always have two or three starters back. It was a very stable situation and college basketball itself was much more stable than it is now. We've never had anything like this ... Let's back up there's never been a year in North Carolina history (like this) and that's a helluva a lot older than we are ... I can never remember a time when we lost more than three starters in my entire coaching career and if we did we still had some guys coming back who could really play."
Are you invigorated by this challenge?
"I don't think I needed to be invigorated by this challenge. I was invigorated when we had everybody coming back."
On if this situation will allow him to figure out more about himself as a coach
"Well I don't need to find that out ... It's interesting. It's invigorating. I'm fired up this year, but I was fired up last year when Sports Illustrated picked us No. 1. I will say this, in some ways practice is going to be more fun because there will be so much more teaching and not just expecting. I've spent a lot of time talking about our players being aware of the fans' expectations but that's all - just be aware of it. Don't let it drive you. We had our own expectations so you don't have those kinds of those things this year ... It has been a marvelous group through the preseason and I'm telling you, they've been fantastic in the running program, in the conditioning program. We had the second half of the conditioning test yesterday and they did about as well as any group I've ever had. That could be because they're scared silly - maybe that's part of it, but they really did a nice job throughout the conditioning program."
On why he wants this team to be a running team
"We don't have a proven scorer period and we definitely don't have a proven scorer inside. I think that at the end of the year most of the time it becomes a half-court game anyway, but you know we scored 89 or 88 or whatever it was in the national semifinals and had a huge second half and ran off and left a very, very good basketball team so we'll always try and be a running team. I think it's important that you can score in a half-court offense, but if you can't you'd better try to score in an open-court kind of thing where there's not as much traffic. In addition to that, I think that's the way that I want to play and it's the way I want to recruit."
On how his life has changed since winning a national championship
"Not much and I'm being very sincere. I made the decision not to take a lot of speaking or a lot of appearances so I took none ... More people yelled at me going through the airports. That was the biggest change. I really don't think I've changed at all ... the difference is the way people look at you. The way people look at you, it is a little different and it makes some people perhaps think that it puts you in a different category whereas myself I really don't think that. It's also nice to know that you've got that in the back of your mind and that you always have that memory."
On what the first day of practice will be like with many of last season's stars gone
"It'll be interesting. It'll be scary too, but I'm not going to mind that part of it because I think, again, those first five weeks is my favorite time of the year. I actually get to coach, which is what I want to do. This is fun to me and going out there and trying to decide which guys to put with which guys and teaching them the fundamentals and teaching those guys our foundation of the pressure man-to-man defense, the running game, our freelance offense, the fundamentals of how we want to play the game. That's what I love doing."
