By: Carter Schroppe
The phrase “Carolina Family” should refer not to esteemed alumni who want a job at their alma mater, but the middle-class family with two kids who traveled from Greenville to Chapel Hill on a weeknight to watch the Tar Heels win.
Every single one of the assistant coaches on our men’s basketball staff is an alum of the university. It’s an unprecedented and unique statistic—we’re the only Power Five program to do that.
Since I’ve been at UNC, I’ve heard the phrase “Carolina Family” in many different contexts. It refers to the broad group of former players, coaches, and support personnel who make up the majority of the men’s basketball program. Its existence makes sense—UNC is unique in that the legendary Dean Smith coached here from 1961 to 1997 before Roy Williams, a former player and assistant under Smith, took over (with three years of Bill Guthridge in between). Hubert Davis is a former player and someone who was an assistant under Coach Williams. Part of the idea here is that hiring former assistants and alums ensures that we have loyal coaches and staff who are passionate about and familiar with the program.
Coach Williams established some consistent pillars of UNC basketball that should be and are recognizable to Carolina fans. Tradition holds that the team plays a fast-paced brand of basketball that emphasizes getting out on the fast break and letting a tandem of talented guards dictate the game. We’ve always had great big men—think Tyler Hansborough, Sean May, and Brice Johnson—who can swallow up rebounds and then send outlet passes to the likes of Ty Lawson, Marcus Paige, and Coby White. On top of that is our emphasis on developing players, rather than giving in to the one-and-done craze that’s been exemplified by Kentucky and Duke over the years. (34 five-stars they’ve had since they last won a championship… yikes.)
That’s all great, and Coach Davis has done many things to preserve this culture, but this “Carolina Family” thing overlooks the only truly meaningful value that matters: Winning.
And that pillar has been spurned by the men’s basketball program. Throwing a bone to an alum so they can have a nice job at Carolina is implicitly disrespectful to the single mother who paid an arm and a leg to entertain her son on a Saturday afternoon. The cop who brought their daughter and one of her friends to the Dean Dome to watch that same game—who’s got to deal with nightmarish parking, and pays $8 for a bottle of water—shouldn’t have to watch us lose to Stanford because someone wants to sit in a bigger chair.
The families and individuals who pay to watch Carolina play are the relevant units upon which the phrase “Carolina Family” should be built. The measured metric shouldn’t be the percentage of assistant coaches who are alums, but how many checks there are in the win column. The “Carolina Family” I always hear about consists of people who are getting paid by the university—along with the wealthy alumni who sit (and I mean sit) in all the nicest seats.
I’m content to watch a game and know that all the assistants on the sidelines are Tar Heels, and I actually love that and do cherish and respect this emphasis we’ve put on hiring alums… so long as they’re winning games. But they’re not, and therein lies the problem. (Going 23-14 and barely making the tournament is not even close to our standard.)
I don’t have a problem with any particular assistant coach nor am I necessarily calling for a firing spree. (It’s already too late at this point and firing staff members would probably just do more harm than good.) Jeff Lebo, Marcus Paige, and Sean May are Carolina legends who are certainly to an unspecified degree worthy of their roles.
It just needs to be pointed out that our hiring practices have been based not on meritocracy, but connections and cronyism.
And that’s not right—and the Carolina family that most incurs the cost of our losing to Stanford on a Saturday afternoon is not Brad Frederick or Bobby Frasor, but the mother living paycheck-to-paycheck whose son was begging her to take him to a game all week.
This university represents and serves the people of North Carolina. It represents and serves Carolina alumni and former players as well, of course, but this university owes significantly more to the taxpayer than it does a former player.
And to be frank, the aforementioned culture that Coach Williams established has been abandoned anyway.
This past season, we had RJ Davis, Seth Trimble, Elliot Cadeau, Drake Powell, and Ian Jackson as our guards. Four out of those five players are renowned for their athleticism and speed, yet Coach Davis hardly emphasized the fast break at all. This should have been the most exciting Carolina team in years, with three five-star recruits who made their bones as guys who play above the rim. We saw the team run the same half-court set time and time again when we should have spent the season watching Elliot toss alley-oops to Ian and Trimble left and right.
Add to that the lack of big men we had, and it’s clear that the X’s and O’s that the “Carolina Family” claims to preserve have been shattered anyway. And that’s not to mention former player and NBA-veteran Raymond Felton who unfairly and unnecessarily ripped Cadeau mid-season. (The way that kid was treated by this program was completely unacceptable; he was literally known for being the toughest guy on the team and we discarded him because he’s not perfect, apparently. Cadeau showed more heart and hustle than anyone else, yet somehow he ended up being the scapegoat for alumni and fans? Unbelievable. Good on him for getting out of town; he deserves to play for a university and a coach that treats him with respect.)
The purpose of this inquiry is to give a voice to the voiceless—the taxpayers and the fans who don’t have prestigious job titles and deep pockets. They want this university to uphold a standard of excellence, and it hasn’t been doing that on the basketball court as of late. And that’s unacceptable, and it’s about time someone discusses how out of touch and absurd this program’s hiring practices are. And it’s a shame, because when Coach Davis needs to and will be fired sometime soon, we’ll be firing a highly respected, esteemed alum who’s given his all to this team and this program.
The purpose of this inquiry is not to rip Coach Davis or the assistant coaches. I sincerely hope that they’ll prove me wrong and force me to eat my words.
But they lost to Stanford at home on a Saturday and almost threw away myriad other games. We almost lost to State, but Elliot Cadeau made a game-winning pass to Jalen Washington in the closing moments. We almost lost to Notre Dame as well—wait, did Elliot Cadeau make the game-winning play in that one, too? That Boston College game gave me night terrors and our performance against Georgia Tech early in the season was humiliating. There’s also that home game we almost lost to Pitt… yup, you guessed it, Elliot Cadeau made the game-winning defensive play in that one, too. (You should never let the great be the enemy of the good.)
To qualify, these coaches did win the ACC regular season championship last season and have otherwise had their fair share of success. They’ve also represented the Carolina Family with class and grace at every turn—the way Coach Davis handled that last loss to Duke made me very proud, and one can only hope that they’ll continue to make the right choices moving forward with regard to tough moral moments.
They also ended Coach K’s career not once, but twice.
And those two victories ensured that despite the ups and the downs, of which there were many, I got to witness an unforgettable chapter of Carolina basketball and will take those memorable moments with me to my grave.
I’m just glad at this point that Carolina’s basketball program promotes the virtuous notion of a “family,” while that other school down the road decided to vilify women through their creation of the gendered term, “The Brotherhood.” Let’s try to have some class, Duke, come on—and perhaps that logo would look better if it were written in cursive?