WRAL Sports Fan

North Carolina

Older, wiser Tar Heels deal with expectations

By David Reynolds

Mar 31, 2009

Before the season began for the North Carolina men’s basketball team, the wealth of talent and experience returning to Chapel Hill led to enormous expectations for the program’s 2008-09 campaign.

Prognostications for the Tar Heels placed them unanimously at the top spot in both the AP and ESPN/USA Today Top 25s, and it wasn’t long before sportswriters around the country began to throw around the terms “Carolina coronation” and “undefeated” to describe UNC’s prospects for the upcoming season.

And with Ty Lawson, Wayne Ellington and Danny Green rejoining last year’s National Player of the Year Tyler Hansbrough after withdrawing their names from the NBA Draft, those expectations didn’t seem all that far fetched.

Each member of the starting five held at least two seasons worth of seasoning in Roy Williams’ system, and the group was coming off a Final Four appearance the year before. Even with a left foot injury sidelining senior Marcus Ginyard indefinitely, expectations for the team could seemingly only be satisfied with a national championship.

“Before the year, people were talking about, ‘Will this be a failure if you didn’t win a national championship?’” Hansbrough said in a news conference Tuesday. “To me it’s kind of, how are you going to look at that before we even play our first game?”

Then came the 0-2 start to ACC conference play, and chinks began to appear in North Carolina’s armor. Critics panned UNC’s inability to defend on the perimeter and shut down guard penetration without Ginyard, and suddenly UNC wasn’t even a guarantee to win its conference, let alone a national title.

But then experience and talent kicked in for the Tar Heels. North Carolina began to dig in on defense and reeled off ten straight ACC wins following its inauspicious start to the conference season, en route to clinching the conference’s regular season title.

But it certainly hasn’t been easy for UNC’s players trying to manage and fulfill their own goals and others’ expectations of them. Williams said making decisions on injuries to Hansbrough, Ty Lawson, Tyler Zeller and Ginyard during the season made earning a return trip to the Final Four even more challenging.

“You cannot imagine the stress that you as a coach feel when you have a drill or an exercise that you’re doing for eight minutes…and you’re afraid that if you go for one more minute you’re going to hurt that kid,” Williams said about Hansbrough’s early-season stress reaction in his foot. “And then three months later you’ve got a kid who’s toe is swollen up…you have no idea what it feels like when you say, ‘Well I need to get him out there for one play but what if he tears his toe up.’”

Hansbrough even called realizing some of these expectations a “relief” after his team clinched a trip Final Four with a win against Oklahoma.

“We started off rough in ACC play and everybody jumped off our ship and started criticizing us,” Hansbrough said. “We’ve actually proven ourselves to get to this point. It feels like a lot of pressure has been released.”

This week, UNC finds itself in a similar position to the beginning of the season. The Tar Heels have an experience advantage over the other three teams in terms of having played in the atmosphere of the Final Four last year, and North Carolina has already won a game this season on the elevated court at Detroit’s Ford Field.

And just like in the preseason, there seems to be a general consensus that UNC is the favorite to win the national title.

But for now, UNC’s players are taking it one step at a time. Lawson said 2008 Final Four provided an education on the media frenzy Tar Heels’ should expect in the coming days.

“We all know what’s coming this whole week. We know it’s going to be busy,” Lawson said. “Last year it was an eye opener, we had interviews all over the place.”

Williams said last year’s experience will help the players prepare for the “pageantry” of the event, but didn’t think that Dec. 3’s game at Ford Field against Michigan State will be much of a factor.

“I personally don’t think it’s any advantage,” Williams said. “I’ve played many golf courses and the best round I ever had was the first one I ever played.”

Hansbrough said that UNC has learned the importance of focusing through the distractions and buzz surrounding the Final Four after last season’s blowout loss to Kansas. The senior said he and the rest of the UNC will use the memory of his team falling behind the Jayhawks 40-12 last season as motivation not to come out flat Saturday night against Villanova.

“We definitely didn’t come out like we wanted to against Kansas, I just think maybe we were a little blown away by everything that was involved in the Final Four,” Hansbrough said. “We definitely know the position we’re in now and how to handle it.”