University of North Carolina Athletics
Droschak: Tar Heels Fight Through It
January 7, 2006 | Men's Basketball
Jan. 7, 2006
by David Droschak, TarHeelBlue.com
Fighting through difficult game situations as freshmen can be a hard road in the Atlantic Coast Conference. The youthful North Carolina Tar Heels faced one of those crossroads just a few minutes into their league opener against arch-rival and red-hot N.C. State on Saturday.
The 25th-ranked Tar Heels trailed 11-0 and looked as if they might get run right out of the Smith Center to Franklin Street on a crisp January day.
Roy Williams stood by and may have made his best coaching move so far this season. He did nothing. Williams let his team play on.
"I was a little bit nervous because they came out so fired up," said Marcus Ginyard, one of three freshmen to start the ACC opener for the Tar Heels. "When coach didn't call a time out he let us know we could get ourselves back into it. It really gave us a lot of confidence."
"Coach always says, `We got ourselves into this situation, so get out of it,"' added senior David Noel. "That's what we did."
Williams said he made a conscious decision not to call the timeout to try to shift the momentum of the game the Tar Heels ended up winning in the final three minutes 82-69.
"If it had been 44-0 I was not going to call a timeout," a glowing Williams said. "My team is so young they've got to grow. I told them at the TV timeout that I had confidence in them and they should learn from that. I wasn't going to stand over there and panic."
Williams is a firm believer games are never won or lost in the first few minutes. And with 479 career wins now under his belt, who is going to argue with him?
Soon after the early Wolfpack surge, the Tar Heels battled back into the game with a 3-pointer by Ginyard, a fantastic windmill dunk by David Noel and a pair of free throws by Bobby Frasor, who played the game of his life in the second half.
"Probably 16,000 of the 22,000 Tar Heels in there were wondering why in the crap am I not calling a timeout," Williams said. "Well, I know my team and I'm in this thing for the long haul. I felt it was better for them to fight their own way out of it."
We all know the Tar Heels (9-2) a little bit better now, too. It's a gritty group of what many people would say have overachieved so far in 2005-06. But when does overachieving become reality? When does a win over the 13th-ranked team in the nation serve notice that Williams is once again working his magic?
Like he did a minute into the second half when he yanked Frasor after he got the ball stolen from him on the first possession. Williams is like most ACC coaches and rarely takes a player out of the game immediately after making a glaring error. But Frasor was headed to the bench on this occasion for a masterful piece of coaching.
Frasor wasn't yanked because he lost the ball, but because he gave Williams a gesture as if he had been fouled.
"I told him this is the big leagues, not the Chicago City League and if you want to be a conscientious objector just stay over here with me, but if you want to be a basketball player you have to fight through those things," Williams said.
Man, did the freshman point guard fight on.
Frasor had just two free throws in the opening 20 minutes, but finished with 17 points on 6-of-7 shooting in the second half.
"The way I've always coached is if I have enough confidence in you I'm going to give you some chances out there, and if you screw it up I'm going to give you more chances," Williams said. "I was really mad at Bobby because I didn't want him to make excuses."
Frasor wasn't on the bench for long and was a key down the stretch. UNC led 60-57 with 8:21 left before Frasor scored on a baseline jumper, a driving layup, a 3-pointer and a fastbreak bucket over the next five minutes. He also was a catalyst on defense, helping force N.C. State's further out on the court than it likes to play.
The result was a second half in which the Tar Heels shot 61 percent, while the Wolfpack struggled to 38 percent.
Frasor said Williams got his attention with the early second-half substitution. "He talked to me and I settled down," Frasor said. "I was just more aggressive after that. I started attacking more."
Frasor and the rest of the Tar Heels also attacked the mental part one game after Williams said his team beat Davidson from the "neck down."
That wasn't the case Saturday against one of the more veteran and sound teams in the ACC, going on a 13-0 run to end the game.
"I'm ecstatic with just about everything our team did," Williams said.
David Droschak is the former sports editor for the North Carolina bureaus of the Associated Press, the largest news-gathering organization in the world. In 2003, Droschak was named the North Carolina Sportswriter of the Year. He currently works in public relations at Robbins & Associates International, based in Cary.
