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Men's Basketball
- Title:
- Director of Player and Team Development
- Email:
- jmanuel@unc.edu
- Phone:
- 919-962-1154
A tri-captain on Carolina’s 2005 NCAA championship team, Jackie Manuel is in his second season as director of team and player development and his first as head coach of the junior varsity program.
Manuel coordinates career development, community service, video services, diversity programming and the Hubert Davis Basketball Camp/Carolina Basketball School.
Manuel joined Hubert Davis’s staff prior to the 2021-22 season after a year as director of player personnel, development and recruiting operations with Courtney Banghart’s UNC women’s basketball team. The 2022 Final Four was his second as a Tar Heel.
Manuel played for the Tar Heels from 2001-05. He went on to play professionally for five seasons before beginning his post-playing career in 2011-12 as an assistant strength and conditioning coach for the Tar Heels. He began his coaching career under former Tar Heel guard Wes Miller at UNCG in 2012-13.
He spent four years in Greensboro, was an assistant coach at Valparaiso in 2016-17 and coached for three seasons at UNCW, where he worked for former Tar Heel assistant coach C.B. McGrath.
Manuel earned All-ACC Defensive team honors as both a junior and senior. He started all 37 games as a senior in 2004-05, when the Tar Heels finished 33-4 and beat Illinois in the NCAA title game in St. Louis. He was Carolina’s defensive player of the game 13 times as a senior and was the team’s Defensive Player of the Year and Most Inspirational Player in both 2004 and 2005.
ESPN’s Dick Vitale said of Manuel, “He’s a defensive standout who plays well against opposing big guards or small forwards, making them work hard for everything they get. He understands his role and provides a defensive stopper.”
Manuel started 86 of 126 games at Carolina, totaling 785 points, 429 rebounds, 229 assists and 148 steals. He scored a career-high 16 points three times in his career – twice against Clemson and once against Penn State.
Manuel played four seasons in the NBA Development League and one season in Miyazaki, Japan.
Manuel graduated from UNC in 2005 with a degree in African-American studies. A native of West Palm Beach, Fla., he was inducted into the Palm Beach County Sports Hall of Fame in 2016.
Manuel and his wife Ronda, also a Carolina graduate, have two daughters, Ryann and Kameron, and a son, Jordan. Ronda Manuel is the Associate Dean of Development for UNC’s Arts & Sciences Foundation.
