by Roy Williams
Marty asked somebody to take me into the umpires’ locker room. So I called Shane Battier from the umpires’ locker room at Yankee Stadium, standing beside a guy who looked like he was 400 years old with mud on his hands rubbing up baseballs.
When I go to a recruit’s home, I give it to him straight. I want recruits to feel like they’re talking to a coach and not a salesman. I have a video with game highlights. I have articles with academic ratings. Then I tailor my talk to what I think is the most important factor for each prospect. At the end of the night I ask if there are any questions, and my hope is that he’ll look me in the eye and say, “No, Coach, you answered everything.”
Now I know recruits might say that just to get rid of me, because I’m not going to be the best for everybody, but I try to make our presentation sincere, passionate, and entertaining. I remember going to Adonis Jordan’s home. Rick Barnes, the Providence coach, was scheduled to come in right after me. Rick arrived at the door 15 minutes early and rang the doorbell. Something funny had happened and we were all laughing and carrying on, and someone opened the door to Rick, and he said, “Sounds like you’re having a party.”
I said, “Coach, you’re right, and it’s going to last 15 more minutes.”
That is my time to sell our program, to say this is how we see you fitting in and would you please come join us. Of course, you can’t plan everything. I got to Jerod Haase’s house, and his mom, Carol, said, “I’ve got some pizza for everybody. We have Canadian bacon and pineapple or vegetarian.”
I do not eat pizza. I’d rather eat a napkin than a vegetarian pizza, so I chose the other one and they gave me two huge slices and I picked off every piece of pineapple and every piece of bacon and ate the crust and that’s all I could stomach. It almost made me sick, but what choice did I have? I really wanted to sign Jerod Haase.
At North Carolina I use our rivalry with Duke as a recruiting tool. I’ll say, “If you’re a fan of Michigan or Michigan State, and those two teams play each other, the next morning you know who wins. If UCLA and Southern Cal play and you’re a fan of one of those schools, the next day you know who wins. When Duke and North Carolina play, that night everybody in the country knows who wins. Why wouldn’t you want to play in the biggest game there is in college basketball?”
For pro prospects, I also try to sell them on a dream. I’ll say, “I know you want to be an NBA player and those NBA scouts want to see you perform on the biggest stage. Players that play in the Final Four always dominate the draft. You have big-time dreams and so does Roy Williams. What would be fun would be to see if we could reach those dreams together.”
I never forget that everybody I recruit is somebody’s child. In 1990 I went to visit Patrick Richey who was leaning toward going to Missouri. At the end of my presentation, I looked his mother in the eye and said, “If your son comes to Kansas, I will take care of him the same way I would want you to take care of my son if I sent him to live with you.” I heard later that as soon as I left, Patrick’s mother stood up and said, “Folks, we’re going to Kansas!”
Of course, like every college coach, I’ve lost way more recruiting battles than I’ve won. When I was at Kansas recruiting Jimmy King, I spent a lot of time on him and thought he was the perfect fit for us. He visited Lawrence and absolutely loved it. Coming back, his mother picked him up at the airport and she saw a magazine with an article about America’s best colleges. The magazine didn’t list Kansas among the top 25 percent of colleges academically. She couldn’t handle that. She wanted Jimmy to go to a great academic school. Jimmy called me up crying and told me he was going to Michigan. That just killed me. It was all about that one article.
So Jimmy went to Michigan and became part of the Fab Five and they made the Final Four his freshman and sophomore years. Then in his senior year we happened to be in Dayton, Ohio, in the same regional as Michigan, and we won our first-round game. When we got back to the hotel, standing there with all the Kansas fans were Jimmy King’s mom and dad. Michigan had lost that day and they had come over to our hotel just to see me. His mom hugged me and said, “We are just here to help you celebrate. It was a tough day for us, but I just wanted to tell you that I made such a huge mistake. Watching you these last four years, Jimmy would have loved to have played for you.”
That was all great, but we still didn’t have Jimmy King.
So I enjoy recruiting when I get a chance to sit and talk with the kids and their families, and I love recruiting when I get in the gym, but there are other parts of recruiting that really stink. It can be demeaning. Kids have lied to me. I once had a recruit ask me to gather all of my assistant coaches and secretaries and everybody else we could find into my office, so he could commit to me in front of a huge group. We all cheered and hugged, and then six weeks later he called to tell me he was going to Michigan State.
The whole thing is an insane experience. Players are being recruited when they are still just kids. There are guys in ninth and 10th grade thinking about making commitments, and our admissions office will say, “How can we decide if a kid should come to college when he hasn’t taken sophomore English?”
Nowadays, the NBA affects everything in recruiting. A lot of kids go to college with the idea of staying just one or two years, and that’s not as fulfilling for me. I used to think it was a great thrill for a kid to be offered a scholarship to come to college. For some people, we’re now just a bus stop.
Dwight Howard only visited one college, North Carolina. When he announced at his press conference he was going straight from high school to the NBA, he said that if he had gone to college he would have come and played for me. That was nice to hear, but he never played for me. I remember Dwight once showed me a paper that he’d written for an English class in the ninth grade titled “Dreams.” He wrote that he wanted to be a starter in high school as a freshman, that he wanted to win four state championships, and that he wanted to be the first player taken in the NBA draft. His teacher gave him an A on it, and there was not one word in there about college. That was discouraging.
Sometimes I’ll spend two years recruiting a kid, write him handwritten notes three times a week, call him whenever it’s allowed, go to see him play a lot, and then when he makes his decision to go somewhere else, he doesn’t even call to tell me. I understand that every kid isn’t going to come play for me. It’s just that when I come in second, it upsets me. I invest a lot of myself personally, so it probably hurts me more than some other coaches.
In the end, recruiting is like farming. Every day you pull the weeds, water, try not to let it get too much sun and then you don’t have any idea until the crops come in whether you did worth a darn. You may have a kid show up as a freshman and drop dead of fright before his first game. I’ve had recruits arrive on campus, and then I say to myself, “Dang, he’s not as good as I thought he was.” Others come and I think, “Dang, he’s a lot better than I thought he was.” You just never know for sure what you’ve got until they’re on your court.
IN THE SUMMER between my junior and senior years in high school there were a bunch of guys who, two or three nights in a row, had thrown eggs at each other, and the tension was building between the two groups. One was my group of friends from the Biltmore community, and the other was from Valley Springs, but I had friends on both sides. A lot of them wanted to fight, and I knew it could get ugly. One night a few of us brought both groups together, and I said, “Let’s just have an egg war, and let’s settle it. Let’s have some fun and get this over with.”
We all agreed to meet on a Friday night at the Burger King in Bilt-more and we made a game plan. We spent the next couple of hours going around to grocery stores and we bought 111 dozen eggs. They had 13 guys and we had 12. They had 63 dozen eggs and we only had 48 dozen. They had more money. We went out to the football field at Christ School, and the war started at midnight. When you got tired of being hit by eggs, you surrendered. We decided the battle would continue until the last man standing. The winni
ng team’s prize was a watermelon.
Our team took one end of the field and theirs took the other, and at the start most everybody just charged each other. It looked like a scene out of Braveheart. I decided I was not doing that; I told one of my teammates to run with me and we would loop around and attack them from behind, and so we forced two or three of their guys to surrender right away.
That night I really thought I could be the next Johnny Unitas. I snuck up behind a guy with two eggs and he took off running. I threw one egg about 30 feet and I led him perfectly and hit him on the right side of his head. He stumbled a little bit and took off again. I threw the next egg a little farther and it hit him again in the same exact spot, and he went down to the ground and started yelling, “I give! I give!”
I was probably hit with more eggs than anybody that night, but I wouldn’t surrender. Near the end of the war, our team had two guys alive and they had one. We surrounded their last guy in the corner of the end zone. We each had a half-dozen eggs and we were just pelting him until he screamed, “I give up!” Everybody had a great time that night.
That was the first time I ever brought a group together who didn’t all think exactly the same way. I think about the egg war every season when a new freshman class comes in, another group of teenagers with their own competing agendas.
AN IDEA I live by comes from a John Wayne movie called Rio Lobo. John Wayne and Jack Elam are on one side of a creek shooting their guns at the bad guys on the other side. John Wayne looks down at Jack Elam and says, “Scatter gun’s useless.”
Jack Elam says, “Don’t mind if I shoot, do you? It just makes me feel better.”
I love that attitude: if you don’t shoot, you have no chance of killing the bad guys on the other side of the river. If you don’t shoot, you have no chance of making a basket. You have to be willing to try.
I balance that with an idea I take from the Clint Eastwood movie Magnum Force. At the end of the movie Clint Eastwood squares off with a dirty cop who had tried to kill him. He secretly activates a bomb in the cop’s car, and as the cop drives off, his car blows up. Clint Eastwood says, “Man’s got to know his limitations.”
That’s the other thing I think about when I’m coaching: everybody should understand what they can and cannot do.
Coach Smith never liked it when his coaching method was called “the system.” He thought it suggested that what he taught was robotic. He preferred the word philosophy, so that’s the word I use. My philosophy is that basketball is the simplest game in the world — if you can get five guys moving in the same direction for a common goal. Coaching is all about me getting my five guys to do what I want them to do better than you can get your five guys to do what you want them to do. If you have one guy looking out for himself, you’re in big trouble. If you have more than one, you have no chance.
When I was on the UNC freshman team, my basketball idol was Steve Previs. He was the greatest teammate I’ve ever known. He lived by his favorite axiom, PMA, which stood for “positive mental attitude.” No matter how badly I’d practiced or played in a game, Steve would always have something positive to say to me afterward to pump me up. He was like that with our whole team. He never cared one bit about his own statistics. There was not a selfish bone in his body. Every year I coach, I try to find a guy to be as good a teammate to my current players as Steve Previs was to me.
The strategy of a basketball game isn’t that complicated. You get the ball. I get the ball. You get the ball. I get the ball. Those are the rules. The only way I get more shots than you is if I rebound the ball on offense and prevent you from rebounding the ball at your end. Then it boils down to the quality of the shot I get compared to the quality of the shot you get.
My offensive philosophy is that we’re going to run. We’re going to try to make the other team’s players run faster and longer than they have ever run in their lives. In a typical game we want to have between 90 and 105 possessions, and we try to get that number up as high as we can, because if I’m better than you are, the more possessions we play, the more likely it is that I’m going to beat you. If I play golf against Tiger Woods for one hole I might beat him, but over 18 holes, I have no chance.
Coach Smith always said, “Let’s be the actors and let them react.” At some point every year I’ll hold up a dollar bill in front of one of my players and tell him to put his thumb and index finger an inch apart on either side of the dollar. When I drop the dollar he won’t catch it, which shows him how hard it is to react to my action.
In the halfcourt offense, we’re going to share the ball. We’re going to throw the ball inside and look for a good shot and if we don’t like what we have inside, we throw it back out. I tell my players, “If you can shoot the ball well, shoot it. If you can’t shoot it well, find something else to do that helps us.” I had a player, Nick Bradford, come over to the bench one night and ask me, “Coach, don’t you want me to shoot that shot? They’re leaving me wide open.”
I told him, “The coach of the other team is not dumb, son. He’s leaving you open for a reason.”
We always try to do what we want to do, not what the other team wants us to do. I’ve always been amused by football coaches who say, “We took what they gave us.” I don’t want that. I want to take what I want. My thinking is, “This is the way we’re going to play, so what will you do to stop it? We’re going to run the ball and we’re going to work on it every day in practice and take it to the highest level we possibly can, and then in the three days that you have to prepare to play us, there’s no way you can practice defending it as well as we play it.”
It’s like the Green Bay Packers sweep with Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung or Southern Cal’s Student Body Right. You may know exactly what’s coming, but it’s still pretty hard to stop.
People always talk about our fast-break offense, but actually I want our players to work hardest at the defensive end. I ask every player, “Do you remember the first time you were ever really guarded?” I believe we all do. For me, it was in the seventh grade at the YMCA. This guy was defending me so tightly that he wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do, and I thought, “God almighty, why are you doing this to me?” Bobby Knight said it best: “Don’t guard someone like you like to be guarded.”
We play man-to-man defense almost all the time because I can’t coach zone. I despise it. There have been years when we didn’t play zone more than 10 possessions the whole season. Still, you have to have it as an option. One of the few times I ever played zone for any length of time was when UCLA came to Lawrence in 1996, the year after they won the national title. They were drilling us. We were down 15 at the half and I went in the locker room and diagrammed the point zone. We had not worked on it one day that season. We played it in the second half and it was awful, but UCLA started taking outside shots and missing them, and we ended up winning by 15.
About 75 percent of what I do comes from Coach Smith, but we do differ on a few things. Coach Smith always taught players to switch on screens. I want my players to fight through them. He used to routinely run three different defenses on three straight possessions. I don’t change that much. He played the Four Corners. I don’t like to spread the floor much at the end of games. If I’ve got a six-point lead with four minutes to play, I want to beat you by 18.
The bottom line is that I want my players to understand that at some point in every game, somebody’s going to give in, and I don’t ever want it to be us. We want to be the last team standing.
I remember one day when Coach Robinson and I were walking from the locker room to the basketball office. We were side by side and as we approached the office door, he had his keys in his hand and I quickly reached into my pocket, grabbed my key, shoved it into the doorlock, and said, “Gotcha!”
Coach Robinson said, “I didn’t realize it was a competition.”
I said, “It’s always a competition.”
BUT WINNING IS JUST as much about attitude. In my junior year of high
school, our basketball team played at Enka High in the first game of the season. They were ranked No. 1 in Western North Carolina. They beat us, but it was a close game and it gave us some confidence. My teammate Walt Stroup was always confident. In the locker room after the game, Walt and I saw Enka’s coach, Charlie Johnson.
“You guys have really improved,” Coach Johnson said. “You’re going to have a good year.”
“You guys had better get ready,” Walt said.
Coach Johnson said, “Excuse me?”
“You better get ready, because we’re going to beat you next time.”
I was thinking, “Walt, I’m going to hit you right in the mouth. This is the best team in Western North Carolina, and here you are making them mad.”
Coach Johnson said, “We practice two hours every day trying to get ready.”
Walt said, “You better start going three because we’re going to get you next time.”
I said, “Coach, thank you very much. Just overlook him.”
The coach walked out and I said, “Walt, what are you thinking?”
“Roy, we’re going to beat their butts next time. We’re going to be good.”
We played Enka again in late December. They were 6–0 and we were 3–3. Walt came over to my house for a pregame snack and I told him, “Now listen, don’t you go in there and try to stir things up. Let’s just play our tails off tonight and see if we can beat them.”
Walt said, “We’re going to beat those guys.”
“I understand what you’re saying. But don’t be saying anything like that to them. Let’s sneak up on them. Let’s don’t alert them to what’s going to happen.”
So we left to go to the gym and we walked in past the Enka locker room, and I was thinking that I had to make sure Walt didn’t say anything to anybody. I went in our locker room and set my bag down, and I turned around and realized Walt was not there. I ran out and opened the door to Enka’s locker room. Walt was in there and I heard him say, “I hope you boys enjoy your ride back to Enka, because your undefeated season is stopping tonight!”