Carmichael Comments: Leadership

CARMICHAEL COMMENTS: Inside Carolina Women's Basketball
Offseason Edition no. 1
By: Matt Krause (@MattKrausePxP)

"I'm a winner."

With those words, Courtney Banghart declared to Carolina fans everywhere exactly what kind of leader the Tar Heels were hiring to guide the women's basketball program.

Nope, no beating around the bush here. Banghart is here in Chapel Hill to maximize the enormous potential of this program.

National intrigue abounded when the head coaching position at Carolina opened for the first time since 1986 on April 18. Athletic Director Bubba Cunningham and his staff conducted a search that zeroed in on Banghart for a unique combination of traits that make her an ideal fit to carry the Tar Heels into the future.

"Courtney Banghart has proven she knows how to lead students to wins both on and off the court,'' Cunningham said. "She believes in developing strong character and a championship mentality, in recruiting and graduating players who want to serve their community, and in building relationships in and outside of her program."

The buzzword of "lead" was quickly referenced in Banghart's personal follow-up to her declaration of being a winner. To Banghart, winning is a process that begins with assembling coaches, support staff, and ultimately, players, who are all on the same page and focused on achieving success. She then brings the group together and guides the ascent.

"I've been able to amass the right people and lead them," Banghart said.

From a pure wins and losses standpoint, it's true. Banghart is a winner. In 12 years at Princeton, she posted a 254-103 overall record, a gaudy winning percentage of 0.711. With wins come championships — seven Ivy League crowns, to be exact. Add in an at-large berth to the NCAA Tournament and a pair of trips to the WNIT, and Banghart vacates New Jersey with the Tigers on a decade-long streak of postseason appearances. With numbers like those, any Tar Heel fan is likely salivating over what is possible in Chapel Hill.

But as much as Banghart accurately describes herself as a winner, her busy first day on the job at Carolina included a quote that made it clear who truly deserves the credit for the Tigers' sustained run of success.

"We had players that dared to be great," Banghart said. "There were some expectations of how far basketball could go in the Ivy League, and we just smashed them."

Smashed to the tune of a 30-0 regular season in 2014-15, a campaign that resulted in Banghart being named National Coach of the Year. Smashed in the form of a No. 13 ranking in the AP Poll, the highest in Ivy League history. Smashed from an individual standpoint with three former Tigers suiting up in the WNBA.

If Banghart can replicate her success from Princeton in Chapel Hill, she has an expectation of where the Tar Heels' ceiling lies. The short answer: there isn't one, and she fully intends to have Carolina fans partying like it's 1994 all over again.

"I want to win a National Championship," she said. "It's what North Carolina does. And I'm inspired by that. The rest of the world thinks of Carolina as the University of National Champions. Coach (Sylvia) Hatchell has shown that it can be done here and I'm here to honor that legacy."

Coach Banghart will inherit a program that has experienced momentary tastes of winning in recent memory. After all, the 2018-19 Tar Heels went 18-15, knocked off No. 1 Notre Dame and No. 7 NC State, and returned to the NCAA Tournament. The process of putting her own stamp on the program will begin with x's and o's — blending the elements which made Princeton successful with the personnel at Carolina.

"My job is to play to the strengths of our people," Banghart said. "We'll have people that are fast, we'll have people that can stretch the floor. People that can create their own shot, we'll give them the spacing to do that. People that might need screening to get open off-ball, we'll do that too. Defensively, it's the grittiness, it's the cohesion. If you score more points than your opponent, you win, so you can either outscore them or you can stop them."

Comparing last year's Princeton and Carolina teams is oranges to apples (or maybe oranges to blueberries to keep up with the color theme), but the Tigers allowed just 63.7 PPG, and outscored foes by over seven points per contest on average. Defense, more so than offense, requires team cohesion, discipline, and leadership.

Leadership. There's that buzz word again.

In 2015, the same year Banghart was named National Coach of the Year, she was named by Fortune as one of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders.

So how does a member of that list define the word "leadership"?

"Leadership is one who listens, one who inspires, one who cares, and one who communicates with clarity," Banghart says. "And you'll get my best as your leader."

That "best" from Courtney Banghart has resulted in taking a Princeton team that had never qualified for the NCAA Tournament and turning it into a national power. On paper, though it may take time, there's no indication that she can't take the Tar Heels to the pinnacle of the sport.

After all, Courtney Banghart is a winner.

Photo by: Jeffrey A. Camarati

May 6, 2019 | Women's Basketball