As many of you may know (and you current students better know!), our beloved Coach Smith passed away this weekend. Now many of you may not be basketball fans (or sports fans in general), but Coach Smith is such an important figure to UNC (both on AND off the court), that I thought this deserved a thread. For those of you who have been newly admitted, especially from out of state, you might or might not know a whole lot about Coach Smith. I certainly didn’t when I first arrived at UNC. That said, if you choose to attend Carolina (and I hope you will!), then you will surely learn a lot about him throughout your time in Chapel Hill.
Coach Smith is almost certainly most well known for his 879 career victories, 13 ACC championships, 11 Final Fours, and 2 NCAA titles. Within coaching circles, though, he was also well known as an innovator within the sport. He was among the first to use the four corners offense, to use multiple defenses within a game, and an offensive set known as the “secondary break” (which, to this day, is still a staple of UNC basketball strategy). However, if you have ever seen a basketball game (either live or on TV), you will probably notice that often times, after scoring a basket the player who scored will point to another player, often the one who passed the scoring player the ball. Coach Smith introduced this small gesture (known as “pointing to the passer”) to thank players for their unselfishness. Among Coach Smith’s many contributions to the sport, this one underscored his team first philosophy.
Dean Smith also had a strong sense of loyalty to everybody associated with the basketball program. This includes not only our stars such as James Worthy and Michael Jordan, but the walk-ons who only saw playing time during blowout games and the managers and secretaries who worked so hard behind the scenes to keep everything running smoothly. One story that comes to mind occurred when Coach Smith won his first NCAA title in 1982. At the time, the NCAA gave every member of the winning team a commemorative watch during the award ceremony after the game. However, the NCAA only ordered 25 watches, and including all the players, coaches, staff members, and managers of that team, there were 26 members of the team. This meant that the junior-most student manager, who had been with the team for only a few months, would not receive a watch. The day after the team returned to Chapel Hill, Coach Smith called the young student manager into his office. When the manager arrived in Coach Smith’s office, Coach Smith said to him, “It has come to my attention you did not receive a watch during the award ceremony. You are just as much a part of the team as any of the players or coaches, and I want you to have mine.” One thing that I loved about UNC is that it just seemed like people cared about each other. I had professors who may have only interacted with me once or twice in a relatively large class, but I was so surprised at how many of them knew my name and even after the class was over, would stop and say hello and ask me how I was doing (and actually meant it) when we passed each other walking across campus. To this day, I have several professors at UNC that I continue to keep in touch with, to let them know what I am up to and how I am developing as a young academic, but also to hear about what they are doing at UNC now and to discuss the goings-on in the Carolina community. This attitude of caring about everybody rubbed off on me during my time at UNC, and while I have always been a very private, introverted person, I have made more of an effort to get to know people better since I attended Carolina.
Coach Smith also had a strong sense of social justice. Back when Coach first arrived at UNC in the late 50s and early 60s, Chapel Hill was still very segregated. Coach Smith would bring his African-American friends to eat with him at well known “whites only” establishments (and dare the proprietors to kick him out), and recruited the first African-American player to play at a major southern university in the ACC, Charles Scott. While his ideas that what mattered most about a person were their “ability and character, not the color of their skin” seem obvious to us now, in the Jim Crow South of the 1960s, these were dangerous ideas. In 2013, Coach Smith was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom not just for his accomplishments on the court, but for his role in the civil rights movement in North Carolina. One thing that I was taken aback by when I first arrived on campus as an eager freshman in 2008 was the strong sense of social justice on campus. Every student at UNC has a chance to make a difference in peoples’ lives through the Campus Y and other organizations at Carolina. I don’t know what it was like back when Coach Smith was on campus every day, but I think he would be proud of the work of many students at UNC, from those who raise money for the children’s hospital through Dance Marathon to those who are active in service missions overseas (and everybody in between).
There are literally thousands of stories about Coach Smith similar to the ones I recounted just now. One tribute to his lasting legacy is not just the profound sense of sadness from his players and those who attended UNC while he coached, but the fact that recent alumni and current students are also mourning his loss. Almost none of my peers at UNC remember seeing a team coached by Dean Smith, and yet I cannot count the number of tweets and facebook statuses today from them paying tribute to Coach Smith. If I’m not mistaken (some of you current students can correct me on this if I’m wrong), the students held a candlelight vigil for Coach Smith on campus tonight. Keep in mind, it has been nearly twenty years since he coached his last basketball game. In so many ways, Coach Smith was the embodiment of the University of North Carolina, and likewise, the university we love so much now reflects the personality of our beloved coach. For many of us, it’s almost as if a family member has died.
-phonyreal98
(UNC '12)