12 minute read
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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AAnson 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 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
Ducar is perfect to sift through them and respond.
“What I love about Tom Sander is he checked every organizational box for us because he’s got an incredible attention for detail,” Dorrance says. “When we brought Chris in, first of all he checked a coaching box for us because he was a former professional goalkeeper, so he did all of our goalkeeping training. But Chris also has a wonderful sense of personal responsibility and is very conscientious. We needed someone with those skills to be the point person in recruiting because of the incredible volume of requests we get.”
Football coach Mack Brown has an interesting angle in his interview process for
Bill Palladino was a part of 22 national championships at Carolina.
Associate head coach Scott Forbes has received national accolades during a 14-year career at Carolina that has included seven College World series appearances.
assistant coaches: He requires the candidate bring his wife along for the interview. Brown meets not only with the coach one-on-one but with the coach and his wife together and tries to schedule a meal with his wife, Sally, and the visiting couple.
“If I hire someone and he’s a got a problem at home, then I’ve got a problem in the office,” Brown says. “Having a spouse who fits is just as important as a coach who fits.”
Brown says that “one of the hardest but one of the coolest” parts of being a head coach is putting the pieces of a staff together.
“Those pieces are the reasons you make it or not,” he says. “They have to fit the place and be able to work with each other in a family atmosphere. You have to be able to have hard conversations and then move on.
“I was told once by an older coach, ‘Ordinary people making a poor decision but all being on the same page going forward can still make it work,’” Brown relates. “’But if really smart people make a great decision and fight over it, it won’t work.’
“It’s all about everyone being on the same page and working together. Managing that and seeing that all the pieces fit is one of the better things I do.”
During a time out of a Carolina women’s basketball game, head coach Courtney Banghart orchestrates a confluence of opinion and insights from her three assistant coaches on their various niches and areas of expertise. Carrie Moore was a wing player at Western Michigan and set nine school scoring records, so she’s in tune to the play of the Tar Heel guards and how they’re attacking the opponent. Joanne Aluka-White was a center at Middle Tennessee State and sees the game from an “insideout” perspective. And Tim Taylor became a defensive ace during stints at the University of Virginia.
“Everyone brings a vital piece in a really organic way that has been a huge reason we’ve been able to right this ship so quickly,” Banghart said in mid-January of a 12-4 start in her first year as head coach that included un upset of previously unbeaten N.C. State. “We’re incredibly complementary in every way.”
Baseball coach Mike Fox has led the Tar Heel program for two decades and taken his team to six College World Series. He’s had Scott Forbes alongside for all but three of those years, and other assistants like Chad Holbrook and Robert Woodard played and/ or coached under Fox before leaving to take head coaching jobs (Holbrook at South Carolina and now College of Charleston, and Woodard at UNC-Charlotte). As Fox has gotten older (he’ll turn 64 in 2020) he’s been keen to blend in younger assistants and have an open eye toward the kind of analytics favored by younger minds in the game.
Courtney Banghart’s first Carolina staff includes longtime ACC experience with Tim Taylor and significant playing experience with Joanne Aluka-White (below).
“EVERYONE BRINGS A VITAL PIECE IN A REALLY ORGANIC WAY THAT HAS BEEN A HUGE REASON WE’VE BEEN ABLE TO RIGHT THIS SHIP SO QUICKLY. WE’RE INCREDIBLY COMPLEMENTARY IN EVERY WAY.”“
Jesse Wierzbicki played for Fox a decade ago and helped lead the Tar Heels to the 2011 College World Series. He joined the Tar Heel staff in 2016, and one of the elements Fox likes is his ability to coach the players “hard.”
“He is just really tough, has that edge about him,” Fox says. “He was a little bit of a challenge to coach because of that. He was the type that walked that line of being over competitive. He brought that trait into coaching, and that’s something that I really needed and our staff needed. He coaches them hard—like he played. I think our players really respect that. Once they get over the shock value of him being brutally honest, they see how much he cares and how much he wants to help them. As you get older as a coach, you mellow a little bit and you need someone on your staff that can coach them hard.”
The Diamond Heels benefitted during the 2017-19 seasons from the statistical analysis from Micah Daley-Harris, who as a freshman at Carolina in August 2016 offered his services to crunch numbers and provide data to help Fox and his staff. Over three years in school before graduating in 2019, Daley-Harris analyzed countless data points (having as many as 100,000 available at any one time) and provided tendencies on the most productive infield shifts, analyzed pitchers’ statistics with various pitches to different locations in the strike zone, broke down bunting statistics and even knew the tendencies of dozens of umpires to call tight or loose strike zones.
Robbert Schenk added to his international experience by being part of a Tar Heel national title in 2019.
Daley-Harris graduated in three years and went to work for the Arizona Diamondbacks organization, but Fox vowed to make sure that kind of analytics work remained a part of the program.
“I never thought analytics would be part of my coaching,” Fox says. “But the game has changed and you have to be willing to look at things a little differently. This information is something you have to pay attention to. There’s value in it. Then you have to decide how much you want to use or not use. We have kids like Micah coming to Chapel Hill, they’re incredibly bright and they love baseball. I’m willing to listen.”
Karen Shelton, like Dorrance, has four decades leading her team, and the Carolina field hockey team has won eight NCAA titles and 22 ACC championships. Both Shelton and Dorrance in recent years took the initiative to pluck new assistant coaches from “out of the box” arenas, with Damon Nahas joining the soccer staff in November 2015 from a player development academy in Raleigh and Robbert Schenk signing on for field hockey in the summer of 2019 from a boarding school in England.
Dorrance noticed over a number of years in recruiting and scouting that Nahas and the coaching he was providing at Next Level Soccer Academy in Raleigh and in leading the U15 National Team “was the future of the sport” and offered him a job with the Tar Heels.
“Damon is taking us to another level because of his expertise from working in the trenches and developing skills that in my opinion no one else in the country has,” Dorrance says. “I think he’s not just the future for us, I think he’s the future for the United States because of this expertise he developed.”
Schenk has played and coached in Holland, England and Australia. Most recently he served as Hockey Development Manager at Hurstpierpoint College, a boarding school just south of London. He and his American wife were thinking of moving to the States, and Schenk learned of the opening on Shelton’s staff and reached out. Shelton and associate head coach Grant Fulton interviewed him several times via Skype, checked out his references and offered him the job.
“One thing attractive about Robbert is he was a relatively current player,” Shelton says. “He’d played at the highest levels in Holland, England and Australia the last 10 years.”
It also helped that Schenk is skilled at executing himself as a player and teaching the drag-switch shot, a specialized offensive maneuver wielded from the corner.
“All the pieces fit,” Shelton says. “He came last summer and worked our camp and the chemistry was immediate—both with the staff and the players. The team and the staff are collaborations. You get the right people in the right place, and good things can happen.”
Good things, indeed, as in the Tar Heel field hockey team winning the 2019 national title and the coaching staff being named the best in Division I for the second year in a row.
WWhen I first visited Carolina, Coach Kalbas told me that he recruits the person, not the player. That’s something you learn very quickly in college athletics: with building a team, it is not always pure talent that makes the difference.
That was one of the biggest differences I learned when I went from playing individually in high school to playing on a team in college. Talent gets a team to a certain level. But then there’s an element of chemistry and teamwork that gets you to the next level. There’s a legitimate boost you get from wanting to play for your coach, your school and your teammates. The bigger picture makes an actual difference in your on-court performance. Team season is my favorite part of college tennis. When you’re playing with your closest friends and you’re putting in all that work together every day, there is a sense of accountability that pushes you to give your best. You want to work even harder for them. It’s a spectacular feeling when you’re the last player playing and all your teammates are out there cheering for you. As you get more experience as a college athlete, you start to figure out more about what your role on the team should be. Team chemistry is about building relationships. It’s finding commonalities among everyone, and making the best of those dynamics and qualities that each team member brings to the group—both on the court and away from the court. When you’re a college athlete, you spend so much time with your teammates. You’re with them on the court, of course, but you’re also with them so frequently off the court. You get to know them almost as well as you know yourself. These moments set the foundation for friendships that are much larger than tennis. You find that you want to spend time with the people who know you best, and that’s your teammates. I’ve always been the person who wants everyone to get along and everyone to have fun. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized I have to get outside my comfort zone occasionally, in order to do what is best for the team. I’ve tried to step up more in a leadership role and lead by example on and off
the court. What helps is that Carolina is an incredibly supportive environment. I’ve never been part of a community that gives you as much total support as what we have in Chapel Hill. When I was honored at halftime at a basketball game this fall, I couldn’t stop smiling when I came off the court. I have never felt such overwhelming joy and happiness. It’s hard to put into words how much that meant to me. It showed how tight the community is and how much chemistry there is here. It’s never about one person at Carolina. But when someone has “ “As you get more experience as a college athlete, you start to figure success, the rest of the community has no problem celebrating that. There is truly a Carolina family. out more about what your role on the team should be. Team chemistry is about building relationships.
SARA DAAVETTILA
Women’s Tennis Illustration by Jason McCorkle
