Q and A with Roy

In your book, you describe a somewhat troubled upbringing,
with your father abandoning your family and your mother struggling to make ends meet. How did that affect you as a child and how does it affect you as a coach?
It made me want to look for something else to run away to. So I’d go to the gym or I’d go play baseball. I had to find some outlet, and sports was that outlet for me. As a coach, I still see today what it’s done for me. It all started with a little boy and a ball. When you’re playing a sport, it does teach you so much about life. It teaches you that life is a contest, and it’s filled with an individual contest and a team contest every single day.

Carolina and Duke’s basketball programs are famous rivals. How do you think your coaching philosophy differs from Coach K’s? Is the Duke-UNC rivalry really as intense as it seems?
The North Carolina-Duke rivalry is the best college rivalry in sports. It is so intense that every year it gets the highest ratings on ESPN — it’s the top game every year. The day after that game, everybody knows who won. Everybody’s talking about it. Our philosophies are not that different. I play a faster pace than they do, and they play more freelance offense. We try to run it extremely hard. Both teams believe in hard man to man. Duke tends to rely more on the outside shot and we push the ball as fast as we can.

How did you come up with the cheer that that the team says after huddles — “Hard Work”? What does it mean to you?
When I first started coaching high school, we would always put our hands together at the start of the game. The hard work idea was something I wanted them to latch on to as their motto. I wanted them to understand that we have to work harder than everyone else. It’s the same thing we say today. We say it at the beginning of every game and any time we have a timeout. And it’s symbolic; we all put our hands in there together and say, “Hard Work!”

Is there any difference in coaching players now versus when you first started out?
The players haven’t changed that much, but today they have much larger groups of fans around them, an entourage, a posse. The culture that we’re in has changed players on a college level. It makes a kid concerned about the NBA, and sometimes college is just a bus stop. But the players are the same. College is not as important to them as it was twenty years ago.

I know it was one of the hardest decisions of your career: How did you decide to come home from Kansas, after coaching
the Jayhawks for fifteen years?
Fortunately or unfortunately, I had been asked three years prior to come to Carolina, and I chose not to. Then three years later, I wasn’t as happy as I’d been before. It was a hard decision because of the players I was leaving; I’d known them for years, some of them even before they came to school. It was hard to think in terms of giving that up. At the same time, I felt a strong pull to return to UNC because it was home. Our families were here. But Kansas is a great place, and the only place I would’ve left it for is North Carolina.

Would you rather coach a team that is in an underdog position, like the 2006 team, or a team that is heavily favored, like last
year’s team?
I like both. I like being the hunted. I have zero problems being everybody’s biggest game. And yet, 2006 was a fun year. We weren’t expected to do well. Sports Illustrated didn’t pick us in the top 65 and we ended up being the number 3 seed, and it was great. It was a really fun season.

You’ve been called a father figure for your team. What role does family play in your life?
I have two families. The first is my wife, my son, and my daughter, all of whom are my heroes now. And every day I think about my family. And every day I also have thirteen to fifteen youngsters who are not living at home, and they are my family, too. The bonds that we build and establish are strong enough to last a lifetime. The most important part of my job is to build those relationships. And my son, daughter, and wife have done a wonderful job of sharing my time with the players.

Early on, you realized that you wanted to coach rather than play. How did you come to that decision?
I knew that I wanted to coach because I thought that I could do that for a lot longer than I could play. And I also came to that decision because my high school coach gave me such confidence that I could do certain things. It made me feel so good to think that I could do that for someone else, that I could make such a difference in someone’s life, that I knew I wanted to be a coach. My mother has always been my hero, but my high school coach, Buddy Baldwin, has been the most instrumental figure in my life.

Do you remember what you first loved about basketball and what drew you to it?
I loved trying to be involved in any kind of ball sports. Baseball was my first love, and then basketball went flying by it in eighth grade. Part of it was the beauty of the game, the players playing together, the idea of a team. It’s not just an individual with a ball, like you have in baseball. I also liked that I could work on it by myself, whereas with baseball you have to have other people to practice with. So there was the team aspect of basketball that appealed to me, but also I could do so much of it by myself and get instant gratification.

What do you think is the most important thing that you can teach a player? What do you think makes for a great player?
I think the most important thing I can teach is that nothing is going to come unless you put the sweat in. You have to invest the work, the time, the sweat. I continually stress that to our guys. I tell them, “Don’t let anyone put in more time than you are putting in.” They have to put in the time and effort every single day, whether it’s June or November. It’s a year-round approach. You have to have gifts, but once you decide you do have it, don’t waste it. Hard work does not guarantee success, but there’s no way to achieve it without hard work.