This title would belong to Roy's own boys

UNC coach pursues 2nd championship - this time with his own recruits

SAN ANTONIO -- North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams comes to the Final Four today via a different path than he did three years ago.

In 2005, he was the coach who had left the University of Kansas to restore glory to his alma mater, a UNC program that won only 10 more games than it lost in three tumultuous years under Matt Doherty.

Today, as his team plays the Kansas Jayhawks in the national semifinals, Williams' team is composed of and stars his own recruits -- something he could not say when he won his first NCAA title.

Williams dismisses the idea that winning it all with Doherty's players lessened his accomplishment. But securing a second national title would bring him full circle and strengthen his legacy.

At Kansas, Williams was the guy who couldn't win the big one. At UNC, he could became the maestro who has won two in four years. He would become the 13th coach to win more than one national title, joining former UNC coach Dean Smith.

In 2005, critics said Williams inherited his status as odds-on favorite to win his first championship, what with a powerful nucleus of Sean May, Raymond Felton and Rashad McCants already on the team the day he replaced Doherty. After the title win in 2005, those three left UNC and were among the first 14 players chosen in that year's NBA draft.

Those close to Williams say getting to the Final Four with that starry team was probably more difficult than with this year's talented but lower-maintenance roster. The Heels have been pegged as the best team in the country for much of this year.

"I absolutely believe those first couple of years at Carolina were the best coaching job he's ever done,'' said Scott Williams, Roy's son and a former Tar Heel walk-on, "because I'm sure there were times, especially after he left Kansas that first season, when he looked around and said, 'What in the world have I done?' "

It wasn't that the players Williams inherited were bad. They were just prone to individualism after back-to-back seasons of failing to make the NCAA Tournament.

Bill Self replaced Williams at Kansas and found similar difficulty in taking over that team, saying players can be slow to embrace a different style because "they've heard two voices."

At UNC, the Tar Heels were hearing two voices, too, and the echoes reminded them of an 8-20 season in 2001-02, then 19-16 in 2002-03. Several players considered transferring before Doherty was fired to make way for Williams' return to Chapel Hill.

The dominoes fall

"He had to instill trust in us, and that was hard to do,'' said May, who now plays for the Charlotte Bobcats. "The hardest player to convince was Rashad, and he probably did it the easiest. And once we saw, 'Hey, Rashad's on board,' we all jumped on board."

It took a year, though, to persuade them to communicate as a team, to understand that defense would win championships -- to believe that their new coach really did know what he was doing. ESPN college basketball analyst Fran Fraschilla compared it to being a stepfather, "and he had to get all the kids to love him like they were his own sons."

It wasn't easy.

"You'd think they'd be standing up on the desk saying, 'Hey, we got Roy Williams,' but they wanted to do things their way,'' said assistant coach Joe Holladay. "The first year was one of the roughest years that I've ever had coaching, and it was 10 times rougher on Coach -- with frustration, and battles being fought every day. It took a year with the returnees to lay the groundwork for the next year."

Maybe that's why Williams said that May's embrace in the moments after winning the title was, "other than my wife, the best hug I've ever had in my life." He said it never occurred to him that the celebrating players were recruited by someone else.