University of North Carolina Athletics
Turner's Take: Keepin' It Loose
April 3, 2016 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Turner Walston
by Turner Walston
HOUSTON—Last night's national semifinal win over Syracuse put the Tar Heels in position to play for a national championship. For the fifth time in his career, Roy Williams will be on the sidelines as head coach in a national final on Monday night. And so how did Williams' team lock in on the way back to the hotel? By sitting in silence, alone with their thoughts, replaying the game in their minds?
Nah.
“Usually Coach doesn't let guys play music on the bus,” said Tar Heel point guard Joel Berry. “He encouraged us to take our phones to the front of the bus and put it on the aux cord. We were just all in there singing and dancing.”
Loose. The Tar Heels are loose. Roy Williams is loose. Every year's team is different, and Williams has learned from his team just as they have learned from him. Williams has learned that this team can have fun, can joke with one another, can allow Theo Pinson to constantly crash press conference, because all that camaraderie built off the court can pay dividends off of it.
“Coach enjoys [the players], and knows that if he enjoys them and they can get their work done and get on the court and get after it, they can have some fun,” said Carolina assistant coach C.B. McGrath, who played for Williams for four years and has coached by his side for 17. “They know when to take it seriously and when they can crack up, but he does give them a little leeway.”
Because that little leeway pays off. This team has won ten straight games not because their coach has ridden them mercilessly, but because he knows that the same energy that has them dancing on the sidelines at tip-off can have them running the fast break during the game and jumping around afterward. This precise mix of personalities is successful not in spite of their fun-loving, but in part because of it.
“I think that leads to trust,” Joel James said of he and his teammates' closeness off the court. “Guys trust each other off the court, therefore they can trust each other on the court. And if guys can get on each other off the court, they can take the criticism of each other on the court. It's a two-way street.”
And the head coach himself has created an environment to allow that closeness, to foster that growth. He didn't help mold Brice Johnson from a skinny, 10.6-minutes-per-game freshman to a first team All-America by refusing to let Brice be Brice. He helped Brice channel his energy into becoming one of the best players in the nation. Yes, Johnson frustrated Williams, and certainly Johnson himself got frustrated with his head coach. But the two of them worked together, to mutual benefit.
Williams has said that this 2015-16 team is one of his favorites, that he wanted badly to get Marcus Paige, Johnson and James to a Final Four, because of who they are, because of what they have endured for their entire careers, and because of the resolve that they have shown. Now, they're here, a game away from the school's sixth NCAA championship. And with the stage comes the spotlight, and the scrutiny, and the media availability.
Oh, the media availability. Williams has answered question after question. Twenty minutes scheduled on Thursday. Twenty-five minutes on Friday. The postgame news conference on Saturday. Thirty minutes on Sunday. And that's just the scheduled times; the availabilities often run longer. There are hundreds of credentialed media members at the Final Four, many of them seeing Williams for the first time this season and availing themselves of the opportunity to ask him the questions he's heard all season. So if Williams doesn't care to answer another retirement question, feeling that he's sufficiently answered it, well, he ought to be forgiven for that. And a coach on a dais, annoyed by the same things that would annoy you or I, does not make one 'tight,' as has been speculated. It makes Roy Williams human.
“Coach is just being Coach,” McGrath said. “I don't know what being 'loose' looks like. Maybe he's not telling jokes, laying back with his hands behind his head. He's probably intense answering questions; that's just him. But he's the same old Coach to me.”
“He's focused to the point where he can still have fun,” Johnson said. “He's still having fun with us. We're all having a great experience here and he's helping us along the way. He's being a coach.”
And when Pinson crashed Saturday's press conference, Williams didn't chase him off the stage because this is serious stuff, seriously. He laughed, smiled and called him 'Roy Jr.' “I'm glad he did that,” Williams said. That wasn't tight. That was a coach embracing the personality of his team.
“That probably helped him out even more,” Johnson said of Pinson's surprise, “because, hey, that's what we want to do. We don't want to be too uptight. We just want to go out there and play like we normally play.”
“Yeah, this is the national championship game that we're about to play, but it just goes to show how loose we are and how we're not uptight on ourselves,” Berry said. “We're not trying to change ourselves through this process.”
As well they shouldn't because the formula has worked. And Williams, who has been here four times before, knows his team and knows the moment, and knows how to prepare one for the other.
“Coach Williams isn't tight,” James said. “He's focused. He's focused and determined to try to help us get to that point (of a championship), because he's lived it twice. He's been there a lot, but he's had the confetti fall on him twice already, so he knows that feeling and he wants us to have that feeling so bad, and so I'd say he's more focused than anything.”
