Background
Dean Smith was born in Emporia, Kansas, on February 28, 1931. His parents, Alfred and Vesta Smith, worked as teachers at public schools. Alfred Smith coached the Emporia High Spartans basketball team.
The Topeka High School, where Dean Smith started to play basketball.
Former UNC players Sam Perkins, far left, James Worthy, and Michael Jordan, second right, stand alongside former coach Dean Smith.
Larry Brown, right, presents Smith, with a medal during Smith's induction into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in Kansas City, Missouri
Roy Williams, left, sits with Smith in 1991
Smith was described as "the perfect picture of what a college basketball coach should have been"
Jordan described Smith as "my second father"
North Carolina guard Michael Jordan, left, and Tar Heels coach Dean Smith are shown at a news conference in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1984 where Jordan announced he would forfeit his final year of college eligibility to turn pro Smith
Dean Smith with sideline instructions during the State Game, 1964
Dean Smith coaches the 1957 Air Force golf team
Dean Smith with Antawn Jamison
Dean Smith, Larry Brown, Roy Williams
Dean Smith and Jim Valvano
Dean Smith and Mike Krzyzewski
Al McGuire winning a national title in his last game as a coach certainly rated as a beautiful and memorable moment in college basketball history… but few losses weighed on Dean Smith more than that one in 1977. Smith’s North Carolina teams then crashed out of the NCAA tournament early in 1978, 1979, and 1980. This made his 1981 and 1982 seasons hugely important within the larger course of his career.
It's the Strong Hall of Lawrence campus of Kansas University, where Dean Smith studied.
(This book contains the secrets, strategies, and technique...)
This book contains the secrets, strategies, and techniques that produced the greatest winning tradition in college basketball and will produce results and successes for coaches and players at all levels. This book is a brilliant distillation of the game. The reader will learn the thoughts, insights, techniques, and strategies that guided the University of North Carolina to victory after victory over a span of thirty years.
https://www.amazon.com/Basketball-Multiple-Offense-Defense-Printing/dp/0205291198/ref=sr_1_7?dchild=1&keywords=Dean+Smith&qid=1586438920&sr=8-7
1998
(For forty years, Dean Smith coached the University of Nor...)
For forty years, Dean Smith coached the University of North Carolina basketball team with unsurpassed success. Now, in "The Carolina Way", he explains his coaching philosophy and shows readers how to apply it to the leadership and team-building challenges they face in their own lives. In his wry, sensible, wise way, Coach Smith takes us through every aspect of his program, illustrating his insights with vivid stories.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143034642/?tag=2022091-20
(Legendary University of North Carolina basketball coach D...)
Legendary University of North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith tells the full story of his fabled career, and shares the life lessons taught and learned over forty years of unparalleled success as a coach and mentor. In his long-awaited memoir, he reflects on the great games, teams, players, strategies, and rivalries that defined his career, and explains the philosophy that guided him.
https://www.amazon.com/Coachs-Life-Years-College-Basketball-ebook/dp/B000FC1HD2/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=Dean+Smith&qid=1586438920&sr=8-3
Dean Smith was born in Emporia, Kansas, on February 28, 1931. His parents, Alfred and Vesta Smith, worked as teachers at public schools. Alfred Smith coached the Emporia High Spartans basketball team.
Dean Smith attended Topeka High School. There he started to play basketball. At high school, he was also a quarterback of football team and catcher of baseball one.
After graduating from high school, he went to the University of Kansas on an academic scholarship. His major was mathematic. Smith continued to play basketball, baseball and freshman football in university teams. During his time on the varsity basketball team, Kansas won the national championship in 1952 and were National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournament finalists in 1953. Smith also joined the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) detachment and Phi Gamma Delta fraternity in the university.
After graduation, Smith briefly served as an assistant coach at Kansas, then joined the U.S. Air Force in Germany. From 1955 to 1958, Smith was an assistant basketball coach at the U.S. Air Force Academy.
Smith came to North Carolina as assistant basketball coach in 1958. In 1961, he succeeded the legendary coach Frank McGuire. McGuire had led the Tar Heels to a national championship in 1957, but his aggressive recruiting had put the program in violation of NCAA rules. Smith would polish UNC's image to a fine sheen. In all his seasons, his program never was charged with a single violation.
Smith's only losing season was his first, but it took a while for him to be accepted. In his first five seasons, Smith twice was hung in effigy on campus. "When I was here, Dean Smith was the biggest joke around," said Art Heyman, a player with nearby Duke University. "Everybody wanted him fired."
After his teams won three straight Atlantic Coast Conference championships beginning in 1967, a mystique started to develop around Smith and his "system" of coaching. At the Air Force Academy, he and head coach Bob Spear had started to develop an offensive delay game. It eventually became a stall strategy known as the "Four Corners." The Four Corners involved stationing a player in each corner of the offensive half-court and passing the ball constantly around the perimeter. The shot clock came to college basketball largely because of the Four Corners.
Smith's teams were known for their passing and for their scrambling trap defenses. He also invented the now-common practice of players huddling at the foul line before a foul shot. And more than any other coach, Smith was responsible for the highly evolved platoon substitution that now characterizes the final minutes of most close games, as coaches shuttle offensive and defensive specialists in and out. "On the sidelines, Smith was always several moves ahead of everyone else," wrote Alexander Wolff of Sports Illustrated.
Starting in 1967, Smith was six times named Coach of the Year in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC). His coaching and recruiting turned North Carolina's program into a juggernaut. But to Smith, winning was not the first priority. "My first goal was to keep my job," he told Wolff. "Then I wanted to win. It was when I got more mature that I said, What's most important is that we play well."
Smith was named the nation's top coach in 1977 and 1979. But he didn't win his first national title until 1982, in his seventh trip to the Final Four. It came against Georgetown, when a Hoya player threw the ball to James Worthy of the Tar Heels by mistake. Jordan, then a freshman, got the game-winning jump shot after the team got a pep talk on the sidelines from Smith. Down by a point, Smith told his players: "We're in great shape. I'd rather be in our shoes than theirs... We are going to determine who wins this game." Smith's second title came in 1993, and it was also due to an opponent's blunder, when Chris Webber of Michigan called a time-out when his team had none left. In contrast, the Tar Heels "played with prepossessing calm," noted Sports Illustrated.
After retiring from a thirty-six-year career as basketball coach at the University of North Carolina, Dean Smith, the “winningest” coach in college basketball history, penned a well-received memoir, as well as a specialized book on basketball strategy and coaching. Many reviewers considered A Coach’s Life to be a superior example of the sports-memoir genre and recommended it as a wise and insightful overview of a successful career.
(Legendary University of North Carolina basketball coach D...)
(This book contains the secrets, strategies, and technique...)
1998(For forty years, Dean Smith coached the University of Nor...)
He served as director of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes from 1965 to 1970. He ordered his players to go to the church of their choice every Sunday and return with a brochure to prove they had gone.
Dean Smith was one of the most prominent Democrats in North Carolina politics. Politically, he was best known for promoting desegregation.
A liberal politically, Smith joined in protests on campus against segregation. In 1964, he accompanied a local black pastor and a black theology student to a segregated Chapel Hills restaurant Smith and his players often visited. The visit integrated the restaurant. In 1966, Smith recruited the first black player in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), Charlie Scott. "Coach Smith was always there for me," Scott told Sports Illustrated. "On one occasion, as we walked off the court following a game at South Carolina, one of their fans called me a 'big, black baboon.' Two assistants had to hold Coach Smith back from going after the guy. It was the first time I had ever seen Coach Smith visibly upset."
Smith combined his outspoken support for liberal causes, including nuclear disarmament and abolition of the death penalty, with a devout Christian faith.
Smith was intensely loyal to his players, visiting them in the hospital and keeping in touch with them after they graduated. Former Charlotte, North Carolina, mayor Richard Vinroot, who played under Smith, said Smith wrote to him weekly after Vinroot graduated and was serving in Vietnam. After Worthy turned pro and was arrested for soliciting a prostitute, Smith called and told him, "We're all human. I know you're a great man. Just deal with it as a man."
"I can't think of a time I've ever heard him blame or degrade one of his players, and in return, his kids are fiercely loyal to him," Duke University coach Mike Krzyzewski told Sports Illustrated. "That kind of loyalty doesn't just happen. Things done on a day-to-day basis develop that kind of relationship."
Smith was such a straight arrow that he always wore a tie even in practice. He forbade his players to have facial hair. He and his wife Linnea campaigned to ban alcohol advertising at college sports events. "It's hypocritical for a college conference to have student-athletes tell young people they should say no to drugs when we say yes to beer ads," Smith told Wolff.
Smith always made academics paramount. His players had a 97 percent graduation rate. To the end of his career, he remained firmly opposed to freshman eligibility for high-profile collegiate sports. If freshmen were ineligible, he told Wolff, "colleges would attract young men who are serious about school as well as athletics, because those who want to go pro after one season wouldn't have the patience to wait around." Yet Smith also advocated paying National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) players, and he encouraged many of his stars to leave college early to turn professional.
Although he was one of the best paid collegiate coaches, Smith criticized coaches' salaries as exorbitant. He insisted that money donated by shoe-company sponsors to the basketball program be spread evenly to all sports programs, men's and women's, at the university. He was also intensely private. Only over his protests was North Carolina's new basketball arena named the Dean E. Smith Center in 1983. He "was the one guy who didn't buy into the myth that had been created around him," said sportswriter S. L. Price.
Smith was known for his presence of mind in tense late-game situations. Mitch Kupchak, his center from 1972 to 1976, recalled a game against Duke in which UNC was behind eight points with 17 seconds left. "His calm throughout was amazing," Kupchak told Sports Illustrated. "The way he walked us through those 17 seconds, it was as if he said, "Don't think about this. Just do as I say and we'll win." There he was in the huddle, looking up at us with a kind of smile." The Tar Heels tied the game and won it in overtime.
Quotes from others about the person
In 1997, the year he retired from college basketball, Smith was named Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year. In the cover story on the award, senior writer Alexander Wolff observed: “The passage of time has flattered Dean Smith... [and] drawn a portrait of someone far more complex than the usual sideline screamer... We marvel at how a man so stern summons such compassion, and a man so competitive summons such perspective... Integrity is the trade-off that college coaches have never gotten quite right... but [Smith] has proved it’s possible to abide by both.”
Dean Smith married Ann Cleavinger in 1954, shortly before his deployment overseas with the United States Air Force. They have three children: daughters Sharon and Sandy and son Scott. Smith and Cleavinger divorced in 1973. Smith married Linnea Weblemoe on May 21, 1976. They have two daughters, Kristen and Kelly.