This was an important day for McGrath

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C.B. McGrath, pushed from the nest in Chapel Hill for a soft landing in Wilmington https://www.uncbasketballjerseystore.com/kennedy-meeks-jersey-c-4.html, is already giving basketball clinics.

McGrath had the attention of several hundred high school coaches this morning on the first day of the N.C. Coaches Association Clinic and All Star Games. He stood inside the Field House at the Greensboro Coliseum Complex and drew up intricate plays and diagrams before the rapt attentiveness of most of the high school basketball coaches in the state.

And he’s never coached a game in his life at the varsity college level.

McGrath was Roy Williams’ trusted assistant at North Carolina for the past 14 seasons, a former Kansas point guard who played for Williams and the long time junior varsity coach of the Tar Heels. That s where McGrath first learned the trade and applied much of what he taught in front of empty seats and arena workers cleaning up the Dean Dome in the hours before Carolina’s varsity would play before a full house and national audience.

His story is a lot like that of Williams.

And so is his theory of fast break basketball.

That came as no surprise to those who sat in the stands and watched, coaches such as Greensboro Day’s Freddy Johnson and others from the Triad.

This was an important day for McGrath, whose UNCW program is in the formative stage. He has spent a lot of time teaching his players the exact things he was teaching the high school coaches, the precepts of half court defense, the foundational principles of program building and the Carolina secondary break.

Summer is time for learning, and four months after the high school seasons ended and fourth months before they begin again, the coaches had their notebooks and playbooks open for all to see.

Rick Anderson from Mount Tabor sat with Brittany Cox from nearby West Forsyth, rival schools who have played some of the most heated games in recent years. The coaches talked freely about personnel and strategy and listened together as McGrath drew up plays and drills.

“I’m here for the drills,” Anderson said.

He got a lot of them.

McGrath has them down to a science, the intricate practice routines first designed by Dean Smith before being copied by Williams and then McGrath. Some of them are familiar to North Carolina basketball coaches and fans. Others were new.

“I’ve tinkered with some of them,” McGrath said.

But he’s also found himself resorting to the exact same schemes Smith taught Williams and Williams taught McGrath.

“Coach Williams has started every single practice with the same drill for years,” McGrath said. “Fast Break No. 1. Every single practice. I always said to myself when I get my first head coaching job, I’m not going to start with Fast Break No. 1. I even suggested to Coach Williams once that we start with something else. He listened to me https://www.uncbasketballjerseystore.com/theo-pinson-jersey-c-2.html, and one practice we started with something else. One practice. It was one of the worst practices we had all year. Coach Williams said ‘it was the drill’s fault.’

“Now that I’ve started summer workouts with my team, after all those years, I think we’ve had 12 practices and I’ve started every single one of them with Fast Break No. 1.”

Not that McGrath is a pure clone of Williams or Smith. As we’ve seen with Wes Miller at UNCG and Scott Cherry at High Point, former UNC players who go into coaching use what they learned at Carolina as a base for everything they do, but not as a strict template. Still, as the UNC coaching tree spreads here in North Carolina, the strict rules of practice are handed down and repeated.

It s all about repetitions, McGrath said.

Come winter, it will all be about basketball. Right now it’s about building a foundation for a future, both for UNCW and for McGrath.

When it was time for Smith to push Williams from the nest, he picked up the phone and called Kansas, which had offered the job to Smith, a KU alum.

“Why don’t you hire Roy?” Smith asked. “He’s ready.”

When the UNCW job came open a few months ago, Williams asked McGrath if he was interested. In fact, it sounded as if they’d already had the conversation.

“Coach has known for some time that I was ready,” McGrath said. “And when Kevin Keatts announced he was leaving, Coach came to me and said, ‘I assume you’re interested in the Wilmington job.’ When I said I was, he made the call.”

He’s had it pretty good so far. McGrath never sat in a crowd with a notepad along with hundreds of other high school coaches drawing up plays and drills. He’s had the luck of sitting alongside one of the greatest college coaches ever, going from a player at KU to graduate assistant at KU to basketball operations at North Carolina.

“In the first year I was an assistant coach, we won the national title in 2005,” McGrath said. “In my last year as an assistant coach, we won the national title. I have indeed been lucky.”

He’ll no longer be at Williams’ side. C.B. McGrath is now a head coach https://www.uncbasketballjerseystore.com/joel-berry-ii-jersey-c-3.html, and for the first time, everyone is listening to him.