BUILDING A WINNING TEAM
STAFF DYNAMICS:
MAKING THE PIECES FIT BY LEE PACE // PHOTOS BY JEFFREY CAMARATI
Experienced Tar Heel coaches know a good staff is built of complementary pieces, not complimentary
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Anson Dorrance was a young head coach in the 1980s when he took a course offered by the Gallup organization on leadership skills. “When you’re really young, you think in order to be an effective leader or coach, you’ve got to check all the boxes yourself,” says Dorrance. Instead, he learned a skill that has served him well through four decades leading the Tar Heel women’s soccer team and collecting nearly 900 wins and 22 national titles: Accept that nobody does everything well and hire a staff not of clones but of complements. “If you want to be truly effective, what you have to do is surround yourself with people
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BORN & BRED
who are strong where you are weak,” Dorrance says. “It’s that blend that makes it work.” Coaching staffs across the spectrum of Carolina athletics are comprised of Types A and B, introverts and extroverts, strategy wonks and fundamental drill-sergeants. Some lead with the left brain (logical and structured), others with the right (artistic and intuitive). The good ones are a blend of both. Dorrance points to long-time assistants Bill Palladino (Carolina staff 1980-2019), Chris Ducar (1998-current) and Tom Sander (current operations chief, hired 1998) as cogs who have made the Carolina soccer wheel whirl
seamlessly. With Palladino, Dorrance had a svelte mix of yin and yang. “I’m more a shark with blood in the water and he’s more of a warm teddy bear,” Dorrance says. The head coach hates paperwork and tends to accumulate it by the pile in his office. That’s why the uber-organized Sander fills a niche. The soccer program as one of the most visible components of the Carolina athletic scene is inundated year-round with email from prospects, campers and kids wanting a poster or an autograph. The patient and workmanlike
