University of North Carolina Athletics
Turner's Take: Lebo's Homecoming
December 5, 2014 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Turner Walston
By Turner Walston
There will be a familiar face on the opposing bench Sunday at the Smith Center, as Jeff Lebo brings his East Carolina team to take on the Tar Heels. It will be Lebo's third visit as an opposing coach, but it's still a bit unusual for the former Tar Heel sharpshooter. “It's the one game I never look down at the other end,” Lebo said this week. “I don't know if they look at me or not, because I'm not looking down there. I just try to focus on the game.”
Lebo's history with Carolina dates back more than 30 years. He was a ninth-grader in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, when he received a recruiting letter from Dean Smith. “I'll never forget that,” he said. “It was the very first one I'd ever received, and I didn't even have a transcript yet.” The high school freshman was struck by the fact that he'd gotten a hand-written, personalized letter from Chapel Hill. “I'd always watched Carolina on TV when I was growing up, but to get your first letter and it's personalized from the greatest coach of all time, that certainly sends a signal.”
Roy Williams remembers the young Lebo as a player. “I remember him as a winner, winning the state championship at Carlisle High School,” Williams said. “He had a tremendous ability to shoot the basketball. You could tell his dad was a coach, and he was very coachable.”
Smith assistant Eddie Fogler, who followed the Lebo's high school and amateur career closely. “He loved him,” Williams said of Fogler's affinity for Lebo. And though Lebo would make his mark as a shooter in Chapel Hill (his .428 career three-point percentage is second all-time behind Hubert Davis), Williams said there was more to the player than just that. “He had perfect form, perfect technique, and made them under pressure, but great savvy as a player, toughness, willing to put in the extra time in every phase of the game,” Williams said. “[He was] just a guy that when you were a coach and you went to watch Jeffrey play, you sat there and said, 'Wow, this is pretty much fun. This is a good time.'”
After his Carolina career came to a close, Lebo had a brief stint with the San Antonio Spurs before entering the business world. His college roommate Glenn Dickson's father hired him at Data Flow. Lebo spent his evenings in Chapel Hill as JV assistant to Randy Wiel. “Mr. [David] Dickson was smart. He hired me to let me realize for myself that I probably didn't want to be in business for the rest of my life, that coaching would be my calling,” Lebo said. “I always appreciated him for giving me the opportunity to kind of figure that out for myself.”
Lebo had to realize it, but Roy Williams could see a future coach from the first time Lebo took the floor as a Tar Heel. “A week into practice, you could see that he understood the game,” Williams said. “I was not going to be surprised at all if he ended up being a coach because he understood what it was all about.”
Incidentally, it was a coaching change at NC State opened up an opportunity for Lebo. Les Robinson left East Tennessee State to come to Raleigh, and he brought Buzz Peterson with him. Lebo applied for an assistant job in Johnson City and joined Alan Leforce's staff. Later, Lebo became an assistant to Fogler at Vanderbilt and South Carolina. “'Restricted earnings coach,' that was the title,” Lebo said. “Everybody said that guy doesn't make any money, but I was making $16,000 a year. I did that for three years under Coach Fogler but it was really worth a million dollars to me, because Coach Fogler really opened up his office and his program and taught me really a lot about how to run a program and all the things that you need to do, and gave me the opportunity to watch him and be around and see how it works. I'll be forever grateful to him and Coach LeForce for giving me my first shot.”
Early in his time as an assistant, Lebo couldn't go on the road recruiting, so he made the most of his time on campus, building relationships with players through workouts and meetings, breaking down film, helping with practice plans and understanding day-to-day operations. Putting in that time paid off when he became a head coach at Tennessee Tech and then Auburn and now East Carolina. “Being there every day, I got a chance to learn and see it firsthand, so when I had the opportunity, I wasn't in shock.”
In addition to Smith, Fogler, Guthridge and Williams, Lebo worked with or played for many great coaches, including Denny Crum and Jud Heathcote (1987 Pan American Games) and Larry Brown (San Antonio Spurs). “I've been really fortunate, really blessed to be around those people, and they can't help but rub off on you,” he said. “Some things fit for certain personnel and certain people and certain programs, and other things depending on the level don't particularly work, and I think you've got to find that balance.”
As a head coach, Lebo wants to instill the same 'Play Hard, Play Smart, Play Together' values in his teams as he saw in Coach Smith's. “I think the one thing that we want to be able to do is to play the game the right way, sharing the basketball, being unselfish playing as hard as we possibly can.”
This season, East Carolina basketball is making the transition to the American Athletic Conference, joining a group of schools that have a tremendous basketball history, including defending national champion Connecticut, Cincinnati, Temple, Memphis, and SMU, where Brown is in his third season. “It's going to force us to really put more of a focus on basketball here at East Carolina, and we've started to do that,” Lebo said. Last year, the school opened a new dedicated practice facility. “We're growing. We've got a long, long, long way to go, but I think that the one thing that I like about being back in the state of North Carolina is we've got educated fans in this state about basketball and we knew if we could put a product out there that would play hard, play smart, play together, try to play the right way, people would appreciate that and come out and support our team, and they've done that.”
In Lebo's third season, East Carolina took home the 2013 CollegeInsider.com Tournament trophy in a thrilling victory at Weber State. It wasn't an NCAA title, but it was certainly something to build on. “To win a championship and to do it on the road is something that hasn't happened here,” he said. “It's a real exciting time for us. That same team played Carolina that year and we really jelled well at the end, played great at the end. That was an exciting time for us as we try to grow.”
That team's first-round victory over Savannah State was the program's first-ever win in a postseason tournament. “It's not a program that's been rich in history and in basketball but I think that our people really got behind us and we really started playing well and we had some home games and we had sellouts and that was really exciting to see,” Lebo said.
Now in his fifth season, Lebo knows that there is still work to be done in building a winning tradition in Greenville, but he has laid the foundation. “We've got to continue to get better and this is a long hard process, no doubt about it,” he said. “The new league I think will really elevate our exposure, which will be big for our program and for our university.”
Sunday's game will be big for both teams, both coming off close losses and looking to develop some momentum before conference play begins. “It's a big game for our kids,” Lebo said. “A lot of them grew up in the state of North Carolina and watched North Carolina play and to get a chance to go over there and play on that stage, it's really exciting for them.”
Exciting for Lebo, too, who will still find it odd to walk out of the visitor's tunnel before the game. He'll likely get a appreciative round of applause during introductions, and he'll probably wave to the crowd. Once the ball is tipped, however, you won't catch him looking at the home bench.
