Williams retires after 33 years as head coach
The last time Roy Williams left North Carolina, he was a virtually unknown assistant who was getting his first shot as a college head coach at tradition-rich Kansas.
Now Williams is leaving the Tar Heels again with a resume chock full of honors — as a retiring Hall of Famer with more than 900 wins, three national championships and a legacy built on more than three decades of success at two of college basketball’s most storied programs.
The school announced the decision Thursday, some two weeks after the 70-year-old Williams closed his 18th season with the Tar Heels after a highly successful 15-year run with the Jayhawks. In all, Williams won 903 games in a career that included those three titles, all with the Tar Heels, in 2005, 2009 and 2017.
Yet Williams described himself as a coach who was also bothered by losses and by his own mistakes over the past two difficult seasons, one marking the only losing record of his career and the other being a young group playing amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Everybody wants to know the reason and the reason is very simple,” Williams said at a news conference on the Smith Center court bearing his name. “Every time somebody asked me how long I was going to go, I’d always say, ‘As long as my health allows me to do it.’
“But deep down inside, I knew the only thing that would speed that up was if I did not feel that I was any longer the right man for
the job . ... I no longer feel that I am the right man for the job.”
The Tar Heels lost to Wisconsin in the first round of the NCAA Tournament in his final game, his only first-round loss in 30 tournaments.
“I love coaching, working the kids on the court, the locker room, the trips, the ‘Jump Around’ (pregame) music, the trying to build a team,” Williams said. “I will always love that. And I’m scared to death of the next phase. But I no longer feel that I’m the right man.”
Williams thrived with lessons rooted in his time as an
assistant to late mentor Dean Smith — he still respectfully refers to him as “Coach Smith” after all these years — even as he forged his own style. Williams always pushed for more — and typically he got it. His teams played fast, with Williams frantically waving his arms for them to push the ball. They attacked the boards with his preferred two-post style.
His competitive drive was fierce and only slightly obscured by his folksy sayings and charm from his time growing up in the North Carolina mountains.
His time as an assistant coach
included the Tar Heels’ run to the 1982 NCAA championship for Smith’s first title, a game that memorably featured a freshman named Michael Jordan making the go-ahead jumper late to beat Georgetown.
“Roy Williams is and always will be a Carolina basketball legend,” Jordan said in a statement through his business manager. “His great success on the court is truly matched by the impact he had on the lives of the players he coached – including me. I’m proud of the way he carried on the tradition of Coach Smith’s program, always putting his players first.”