by Roy Williams
I had a difficult meeting with him and his mother. They asked for one more chance. I absolutely loved the kid, but I had already given him all the chances I could, and he understood that.
I knew it was going to be hard to replace what Will could do for us on the court. He was a senior. He was our most experienced player, our best perimeter shooter, our best defensive player on the perimeter. Before the next practice, I pulled the team together and told them, “We’ve got some more adversity to handle. Will’s not going to be with us, but we’ve got to move forward.” That was really a hard day because those kids were counting on Will and felt like he’d really turned a corner and was going to be one of our leaders.
WHEN WE LOST to Minnesota and Vanderbilt in the Puerto Rico tournament to fall to 2–2, I wasn’t alarmed. Those teams both had plenty of talent and experience, and we were only ranked in the Top 10 because of our reputation and expectations. Then we lost at Illinois and against Texas in Greensboro, and I still wasn’t ready to panic. I’d said during the preseason that my team was going to get better and better as the year progressed, and I really believed that.
The one worry I did have was how the players would handle those losses, because lots of people were jumping off the bandwagon and badmouthing us. I know they were all thinking, “Here we go again. It’s going to be just like 2010.” But I kept telling our players, “We have big-time dreams and big-time goals. They are realistic. We just have to do it.”
When Harrison Barnes struggled early in the season, I talked to him about expectations. I told him that he shouldn’t be concerned with that stuff. He is one of the most stoic and focused kids I’ve ever coached, and I thought that if anyone could handle it, it would be Harrison. But I still worried about him. I even had a conversation with his mom at some point later in the season when I told her, “I was beginning to wonder what happened to that guy I recruited.”
She said, “Well, I was beginning to wonder who that guy was disguised as my son.”
What I kept saying to the press is what I believed. If Harrison Barnes is my biggest worry, I’m okay because before everybody else started seeing his productivity and success in the games, I could see it during practice. He started doing things that made me stop and go, “Wow!” I could see it coming.
During the Virginia Tech game at home in early January, Harrison made two or three really bad plays in a row, and I took him out. I was sitting between Steve Robinson and C. B. McGrath. “Guys,” I said, “I am not that bad of an evaluator of talent. That kid is a lot better player than he’s showing. I’m going to let him sit here for a couple of minutes, and then I’m going to put him back in because he might make a big play for us.”
I put Harrison back in, and in a four-minute period he made three baskets that were just huge in helping us win that game. To me, that was the game that really helped Harrison take off. I said to myself, “That’s what I thought we were going to get.”
The next game against Georgia Tech was the turning point of our season. I was so pissed. I was mad with the way we started. I knew we were very lucky to be down only one point at the half, and then we came out in the second half and stunk it up even worse. We lost by 20 points, and I was off-the-charts angry.
I remember Coach Smith telling me many times, “You’re better off not saying too much to the players after a game. You think you have the right opinion, you think you have the facts, but you’re always better off looking at the tape and making sure. You want to be confident that what you’re saying is true.” But after that game I couldn’t help myself. In 23 years I have never jumped on a team like I did those guys that night. Not even close. I ripped into them because I thought we didn’t concentrate, we didn’t play hard, and the players started blaming each other. I said, “How can we not know who we’re guarding? How can we not run back on defense or have two guys run to the same guy and leave a wide-open three-point shooter? How can we make one pass and shoot a bad shot?”
Then I got after them because we had guys wearing five or six different kinds of shoes. Even though I knew it made no difference, I said, “And another thing. Everybody is going to wear the same fricking shoe! We’re going to look like a team when we’re on the court, even if we don’t play like one.” It had nothing to do with the game, but it made me feel better. Finally I said, “We are not going to be like last year where it’s okay to lose. This team is not going to be like that. You are going to change or I’m going to kill you.”
I still had the belief that we were going to be really good. In 2010 it was more of a hope than a belief. In 2011 I strongly believed it. I was so pleased about the wins at Virginia and at home against Virginia Tech because we didn’t play well and we had to really tough it out to win. We would not have won those games in 2010. So I had that as a crutch. I felt like we just laid an egg at Georgia Tech. The year before we’d laid a lot of them, and I’d be damned if I was going to let them lay any more eggs in 2011.
I first started thinking about making a lineup change about six games into the season, because we were really having trouble scoring and Kendall Marshall had been making some pretty good decisions on the offensive end. Then all of a sudden Kendall had a bad game at Illinois, so I couldn’t put him in the starting lineup yet because he was struggling. I can’t count more than five times as a head coach that I’ve made a major change to the starting lineup during the season, but after the Georgia Tech game I had a meeting with my staff the next day, and I told them I was thinking about making three changes to the starting five: Dexter Strickland, Tyler Zeller, and Larry Drew. Z didn’t deserve it as much, but I really thought I needed to shake things up. Then Leslie McDonald got hurt and couldn’t practice or play in the next game, so I couldn’t sub out Dexter. Then I thought, “That’s not fair to Z.” So the bottom line is that I only changed Kendall for Larry.
Before practice started I said, “Guys, do you think I’m the kind of coach who’s going to sit back and let that kind of stuff at Georgia Tech happen and not do anything about it? I started to change you, Z. I started to change you, too, Dexter. Today I decided not to, but that doesn’t mean I won’t change you guys tomorrow.”
Then I pulled Larry aside and I said, “Larry, this is not permanent. It can be if you don’t play well and Kendall plays great. It’s not just your fault, but I’ve got to do something, and this is what I’ve chosen to do. Maybe this will take some of the pressure off you, because you’ve had more pressure on you than any player I’ve ever coached.”
Larry wasn’t defiant. He didn’t throw his arms around my neck and hug me either. It was very matter of fact. Larry said he just wanted us to win. We had a great practice that day.
We won our next four games and we were really good. Our offense ran more smoothly. I realized that while starting Kendall wasn’t intentionally permanent, it was going to be awfully hard to make a change back now that Kendall was playing so well and Larry was giving us such a great defensive presence off the bench. Those four games were the best of Larry’s career, and he really seemed to be buying in to what we were doing. He had nine assists and one turnover in 19 minutes at Boston College. Then three days later, on February 4, I got a phone call from Larry Drew, Sr., who said, “I’m pulling him out of there right away.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. “It’s the middle of the season.”
It was so unexpected that Larry’s roommate Justin Watts didn’t even know about it. That morning Ed Davis called Justin from Toronto and asked, “What’s Larry doing?”
Justin said, “What are you talking about?”
Ed said, “He’s outta there.”
Justin said, “No, he’s not. He’s in the bedroom.” Then Justin went into the bedroom and came back out and said, “Yeah, he is outta here.”
Losing the Wears, Will Graves, and Larry Drew were the three biggest shocks of my 23 years as a head coach, and they all happened within nine months, but at least I was learning how to deal with that kind of change. Agai
n I knew I had to attack the situation head on. Right before practice on the day Larry left, the team huddled up and I went around to every player and said, “If there’s anything going through your mind to say about this, go ahead and say it.” Some of the kids were really hurt, but all of them agreed that if Larry didn’t want to be with us, then that’s fine and let’s move on. They rallied around Kendall. As a team we never discussed Larry again.
From that day forward our players became so much more focused on being a team. Now everybody was just concerned about winning. Everybody was just concerned about our team. Now everybody could trust each other.
Before our next game against Florida State, Kendall came to see me. He was struggling with what had happened. He was nervous. I reminded him of a story David Noel had told me about a time when Kendall was just a sophomore in high school visiting campus playing pickup with our team during the preseason, and yet he was confident enough to point at David to tell him where to go so he could get him the ball. I told Kendall just to be himself and he’d be fine.
The Florida State game was played in transition, Kendall’s kind of game. He was the quarterback. The orchestrator. He had 16 assists in the win, and our crowd really got behind him because they didn’t like what had happened either. Florida State’s coach, Leonard Hamilton, told me afterward that he wished I’d made that lineup change just one game later.
Then we played at Duke. We were the more aggressive team early, and we stunned them. We were up by 14 at halftime, and I told our staff that we had to try to be just as aggressive and not allow our team to look at the scoreboard. But Duke got three offensive rebound baskets in the first three minutes of the second half and took it to us. We hung around and cut their lead to three points in the final minute, but we lost.
Always on my walk from the court to our locker room after a game I try to think about the best way to address what has just occurred. That was a night when I decided to be very straightforward. “I am ticked off,” I told the team. “I am not into any moral victories. I don’t want anybody saying that we almost got them. That’s a bunch of bull. Let’s not try to gain anything by telling ourselves that we played the top-ranked team in the country on their home court and beat them for 25 minutes. I’m not into that crap and you better not be either.”
It was during that stretch of the season that Reggie Bullock became very limited by a knee injury and we finally had to shut him down. We were so used to adversity at that point that we didn’t feel sorry for ourselves. It hurt from a coaching standpoint, because Reggie had the potential to be our best outside shooter, and when we lost him we were down to just eight scholarship players. We started substituting around TV timeouts to give our starters a three-minute break but only miss a few seconds of game time. We were so much more concerned about foul trouble. Guys had to fight fatigue. We really had to call on the toughness we’d built in the preseason conditioning.
We won a close game at Clemson when Harrison made the ferocious dunk. We ground out an ugly win at home against Boston College when we scored only 48 points. We battled through some rough patches to win at N.C. State and at home against Maryland, and then Harrison hit the game-winning jumpshot in the final seconds at Florida State, just as he had earlier in the season at Miami.
Everybody acts like they want to take the big shot that’s going to decide the game, but not everybody really does. But Harrison, like Michael Jordan, is so focused that he doesn’t think about the result or what’s at stake. He’s just going through his routine and making a play. He’s not thinking, “Oh my gosh, this is a game-winner.” He’s just thinking, “Gimme the ball. I know I can do it.” With every one of those clutch shots, Harrison became more confident, and the other guys began believing he was always going to make it.
By the time we met Duke again in the final game of the regular season, it was for the ACC championship. Toward the end of the season the press kept asking me if I’d seen this coming. I said that I hadn’t, but not because I didn’t believe in our team.
I remember one time I met with Coach Wooden, and he told me that before each season he used to pull out his team’s schedule and would write down what he thought UCLA’s record would be at the end of the year, seal it, put it in his desk and then open it after the season. I’ve never done that. I never think beyond the next game. Did I think we could be really good? Yes. Did I expect we could win the conference championship? I never thought that far ahead.
Against Duke I felt like all of the pressure was on us, but I didn’t want my team to feel that way. I tried to be very confident, telling them that the only reason Duke beat us in Durham was because we stopped playing.
It was our Senior Day, but we had no senior starters and I had my whole staff asking me, “What are you going to do about the senior walk-ons? Are you really going to start those guys?” I worried about it, too. I remembered watching my son start as a senior against Duke and how Chris Carrawell scored two baskets against him. But finally I told myself, “I’ve started my seniors every year. We’ve never lost a game in the first two minutes. Those guys have been fantastic for us. This could be the moment of their lives as basketball players.”
Also, I thought if I decided that we couldn’t start the walk-ons, that would cause the starters to feel more pressure. We started three walk-ons and we were fortunate that Duke missed some open shots in those minutes, but the emotion of playing those guys and how our crowd responded to them set the tone for the entire game.
Once the game started, I never felt like we were going to lose. We got up by 12 points at the half and Duke came out and scored the first seven points of the second half. It was just like the game at Cameron, only this time we didn’t panic. Harrison quickly scored two big baskets to take the lead back up to 12. We calmly answered all of their runs.
It was a surreal feeling cutting down the nets that day. I went around to each of my assistant coaches and said, “This is really good because nobody expected us to be here except us. I guess everybody’s back on the bandwagon now.” Then I got the team together out on the court, and I said, “Remember, all year, I’ve told you that our dreams and goals are realistic. You guys believed and that’s why we’re champions.”
After that game someone asked me if I thought the struggles of the 2010 season made me a better coach. I do believe it made me appreciate what we had previously accomplished a bit more, and it made me try to enjoy the wins with the 2011 team more regardless of how poorly we played. But did it make me a better coach? I don’t think so. But I have always been driven by fear of failure. Now I had experienced it and I didn’t want that to happen anymore.
A COUPLE OF WEEKS before the end of the regular season we were talking in a staff meeting about problems that were happening on and off the court at other schools. At that point in a season, some coaches do not like their team at all and some teams do not like their coach at all, and that’s sad because it takes all of the enjoyment out of coaching. “Guys,” I said to my staff, “do you realize how much fun this group has been to coach?” I knew how lucky I was, and I decided that I was going to share that with our players.
Before practice that afternoon, we all huddled and I said, “I am having such a good time coaching you guys. You have given me new life.” It felt really good sharing that with them.
It wasn’t a battle anymore. The previous season had been a battle every day. I had never thought about quitting. I had never thought that I couldn’t coach anymore. But if we had endured another season in 2011 when I couldn’t get the kids to do what I wanted them to do, I’m not sure what I would’ve done. The 2011 team renewed my enthusiasm, renewed my confidence, renewed my faith in my coaching and my love for being a coach. They renewed my belief that what we were trying to do was right.
I’m a strong believer in toughness and that if my team just hangs around and never gives up, we are always going to come back to win. That was never more evident than in the ACC Tournament. After we won the regular season championsh
ip, our guys heaved a sigh of relief and thought that we’d really accomplished something. Then all of a sudden we were in Greensboro playing Miami and getting our butts kicked. We fell behind by 19 points with just under 10 minutes to go in the second half. I kept telling our players that if we didn’t give up, I believed we were going to win the game, and I reminded them how we’d come from way behind to win at their place earlier in the season. We just kept plugging away until we won it at the buzzer.
Obviously, we learned nothing from the Miami game. In the ACC semifinal against Clemson, we fell behind by 14 in the first half. But in the second half, Harrison started making a bunch of baskets, and our team got so excited about what he was doing that it carried them along. I had no idea Harrison was on his way to 40 points. I just knew he was scoring every time we needed a basket. It reminded me of Al Wood scoring 39 points against Virginia in the 1981 NCAA Tournament semifinal. During that game, I remember Coach Smith turning to me and asking, “Do you think Al needs a breather?” I said, “Coach, let’s wait until he misses one.” That’s the way I felt about Harrison that day.
Losing to Duke the next afternoon in the ACC championship game did teach us a lesson. We fell behind early and this time our guys couldn’t fight back and win. I told them, “If that happens again, our season’s over. We go home.” Our guys realized that in the NCAA Tournament they had to be ready to play from the very start.
Whenever we play against a big underdog in the first round of the NCAAs, I am reminded of what Coach Smith always told the press in that situation. “Remember,” he’d say, “they give out scholarships, too.” But then the day before the Long Island game, I noticed one of their players asking one of our guys for an autograph for his little brother. Normally that might have worried me, but before the game I really thought we were ready and I was pleased that we got off to a better start and won the game easily.
Then in the next round against Washington, they kept making shots that our defense wanted them to take. I kept telling myself that they were not going to keep making those shots for 40 minutes, and finally, they didn’t. We rallied to go up by one point with seven seconds left, and I called for the out-of-bounds defense that Vanderbilt coach Kevin Stallings had taught our staff the previous summer. That defense had caused a turnover or a timeout in almost every game that season because it’s so hard to inbound the ball over John Henson. Sure enough, John tipped the pass, we got the steal, and Dexter hit two foul shots to help us win by three.