Nov. 5, 2009
By Turner Walston
•The abbreviated practice time prior to the season's first game presents a new challenge for Roy Williams and the 2009-10 Tar Heels. There are six fewer days for practicing with a team losing four starters from last year's national championship run. For a team counting on younger players to contribute significant minutes, that can be imposing.
"We're trying to teach five guys everything new. Some guys have already been through some of it, but everything is new for five guys," Williams said, referring to the freshman class of Dexter Strickland, Leslie McDonald, David Wear, Travis Wear and John Henson.
"We could have done it last year," Williams said of starting the season with fewer practices. "It wasn't such an inexperienced team.
"They can only learn things at a certain speed, and that changes with each individual. A more experienced team could handle this and probably would enjoy a fewer number of days of practice." Consequently, practices leading up to the season have been a little longer in duration than even Williams wanted.
•This team doesn't enter the season with an established `go to guy,' and one would be wise not to ask Williams to point to one. "I don't know," he said. "Who was our go-to guy last year?" Though Tyler Hansbrough led the team in scoring, at times the team looked to Ty Lawson or Wayne Ellington to step forward to win a game.
"Nobody on this team has ever been asked to do it at crunch time," Williams said. "Nobody's been asked to do it when the other team's defense is aimed at stopping them." Williams compared this year's team to the one that began its season in November 2005. Back then, five freshmen were ushered into the program and would be come the core of a national championship team four years later. This year, playmakers must again emerge. "Guys are going to learn a lot about themselves in the next two to three weeks that hopefully will be positive for us as we go down the road," Williams said.
•When asked for a starting lineup for the season opener, Williams said he had not thought about it for one second. "My guess is that Marcus and Deon will. After that, I don't have any idea. Each and every day I think the players establish themselves a little bit more and give you a little more information."
• Ed Davis hurt his shoulder Sunday and had not practiced since, but Williams expected him to practice this afternoon. Other players banged up: Will Graves' back issues continue to plague him, John Henson's plantar fasciiitis required turning to orthotics, Dexter Strickland is dealing with tendonitis, and Travis Wear sprained an ankle on Sunday. Overall, though, Williams feels good about his team's health. "Knock on wood, we're about as good as you can be at this time."
•Williams talked a bit about the process of writing his book, Hard Work: A Life On and Off the Court , in bookstores this week. Williams' co-author was Tim Crothers, who also wrote The Man Watching about women's soccer coach Anson Dorrance. "It was a huge undertaking," Williams said. "It was a lot more time than I expected it to be, but we decided let's do it, do it the right way and do everything we can."
The book is currently Amazon.com's best-seller in the basketball coaching and biographies sections.
•Williams had this to say about last weekend's closed scrimmage at Vanderbilt: "We just didn't play well at all," Williams said, also using words like `ugly' and `yucky' to describe the team's play. But it wasn't all for naught. "Since then we've gotten a lot better, and I think that the seriousness has hit them, the recognition of how good other people are that they may not have ever heard of. I think that was a good slap in the face for us as opposed to waiting until the season started."
•On Monday, Roy Williams will begin his seventh season at his alma mater, and for the second time, his team is defending a national championship. Question marks abound, but that's part of the fun of coaching college basketball. "This is the most exciting time of the year for me," Williams said. "There's no question that you have some question marks, some apprehension . . . or some fear. `Are you going to be good enough?' I try to throw those thoughts away pretty quickly and just try to do the best we can at practice that day.
Hopefully, if we do that every single day, we'll be better. "I'm not thinking right now of results when we're practicing. We're just trying to get better and put people together in different spots to try to make them the best group."
Turner Walston is the managing editor of Tar Heel Monthly. Turner's weekly Tar Heel football podcast, The Walkthrough, is available on iTunes.
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