Something completely new happened at the Dean E. Smith Center on Tuesday afternoon.
Oh, yes—Hubert Davis coached his first fall practice as the head coach of the Tar Heels. We'll get to that.
But the debut in question was Toby Keith blaring on the arena loudspeakers as practice began. Davis has instituted a rule that each player gets an opportunity to pick the pre-practice music. The selections go in order of age, oldest first.
That means Brady Manek drew the first draft choice, and it meant that his teammates—some for the first time in their lives—listened to an all-country music playlist as they prepared to begin the 2021-22 season.
"None of us had a clue what that was," said Armando Bacot of the playlist that began with Keith's "Should've Been a Cowboy." (Purely by coincidence, that's the same song Eric Hoots played for Tyler Hansbrough to calm down the big man before his first game as a Tar Heel.)
Beyond the actual musical selections, just the presence of music, and the players getting the opportunity to choose it, was a reminder that this is a different era. Roy Williams was in the building on Tuesday, and he attended practice purely as an observer. After the two-hour session, a bystander asked him how he was doing. There will be a significant amount of excitement about the Davis regime in the days to come. It was reasonable to wonder how these last 24 hours have been for Williams.
"Last night," he said, "was very hard." It was the first eve of basketball practice that Roy Williams has gone to sleep without a team since 1973.
What's been beautiful about Williams' retirement decision is that he always knew this day would be difficult. For him, personally, it was an awful, gut-wrenching decision. Carolina Basketball was not his job. It was his life.
But he didn't make the decision based on himself. He made the decision—just as he has so many others since 2003—based on what was best for the University of North Carolina basketball program (there's much more very honest discussion from Williams about his decision on last week's Carolina Insider podcast, a highly recommended listen if you haven't already heard it).
That's why his former players were still happy to see him on Tuesday afternoon, even if he still looks slightly out of place off the practice court instead of on it. But, as Leaky Black said, "I'm happy to see him at peace."
And happy to see him as perhaps the second biggest Hubert Davis fan in the building. The biggest, of course, was Hubert Davis Sr., who made the drive from Virginia to be there for his son's first practice as head coach of the Tar Heels.
Wearing his Jordan Series .02 sneakers—the ones the Jordan Brand created to honor the influence of Dean Smith on Michael Jordan—the younger Davis put the Tar Heels through a practice that didn't look much different from others they've had in the last several months. It's not entirely correct to call Tuesday Davis' "first" practice; the NCAA has become much more lenient about allowing teams preseason practice time than in past years.
"Everybody makes a huge deal out of today," Davis said. "We've practiced several times this summer. Today's was just 30 or 40 minutes longer."
Still, there's no doubt that the atmosphere just feels a little more charged when it's the first official day of practice each fall.
"It's like that energy when you get a new haircut," said Leaky Black. "You've got that different confidence. It's just a different kind of energy."
Tuesday's session bore some similarities to practices from previous seasons. The thought for the day was the Williams favorite, "It's amazing how much can be accomplished when no one cares who gets the credit." The quote was attributed on the practice plan to Williams, Dean Smith and Bill Guthridge. The team still ran fast break drill #1 and #3, which have been favorites for the last two decades, but now missed layups—a point of emphasis from Davis—come with a running penalty attached.
We'll have much more tomorrow on the basketball specifics of Tuesday's practice (and other summer workouts). There will be more about the players who make up this team, and the heavy influence of new faces that should significantly change the way Carolina is able to play.
Davis is uncomfortable with the idea that any aspect of the 2021-22 season is about him. Almost six months into the job, he remains completely incapable of acting big-time. He is the last person in the room you would identify as a decade-long NBA player, a former national television fixture, or the head coach of the nation's preeminent college basketball program. In fact, his main post-practice excitement was his ability to attend his younger son's high school soccer match.
There will be wins and losses over the next six months. His decisions will be alternately lauded and questioned, sometimes on the same night. Davis isn't going to change; that attitude and those priorities aren't going to change. He remains the same soul who constantly checked the stands before every game he played.
"Every time I ran through a tunnel, before I got married I found out where my dad was," he said Tuesday evening. "When I got married, I found out where my dad was and where Leslie was. I had a sense of security knowing one person in the gym was on my side regardless of what happened in that game. Coming out to practice today and having my dad and Coach Williams there gives me that same sense of security. No matter what happened in practice, I knew I had somebody on my side. And that's a great feeling to have."
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September 29, 2021 at 08:18AM
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Lucas: First Practice Report - UNC Athletics
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