STAFF PROFILE:
PAT
SULLIVAN
NATIONAL CHAMPION IS DIRECTOR OF RECRUITING, BUT ALSO MUCH MORE BY ADAM LUCAS // PHOTOS BY MAGGIE HOBSON
T
here’s no greater example of the way building a college basketball staff has changed than Hubert Davis’s hiring of Pat Sullivan. The Bogota, N.J., native is officially Carolina’s director of recruiting. But the first asset Davis mentioned about Sullivan was something very different. “Coach Sullivan, with his 18 years of NBA experience, has been really neat,” Davis says. “We have so many former North Carolina NBA players that come back in the summer and train here and prepare for the upcoming season and all of them want to work out with Coach Sullivan with his experience in the NBA and getting them ready.” Davis has said he’s a believer in “relentless” skill development. It turns out that’s not a philosophy that ends with the current team; it extends to the numerous Tar Heels who return to Chapel Hill in the summer. Even in the still somewhat odd summer of 2021, it wasn’t unusual to walk around the Smith Center and bump into Tyler Hansbrough, Coby White, or Theo Pinson. And now they know there’s a Tar Heel on staff dedicated to helping them get in a pro-style workout any time they want it. Sullivan’s job, then, is fairly simple: he’s going to do a little bit of everything. Which makes it a good fit, because his credentials cover a wide path through every level of basketball. Tar Heel fans will remember him best as a player, specifically as the forward who knocked in a clutch front end of a one-and-one near the end of the 1993 national championship game. He played in more NCAA Tournament games (19) and more NCAA Tournament wins (17) than any Tar Heel in history, and he’s one of just nine Tar Heels who have played in three Final Fours. He’s also been a high school head coach, and he worked a season under Dean Smith as an assistant video coordinator before eventually becoming a three-season assistant to head coach Bill Guthridge. Then he began an 18-year odyssey in the NBA that included stops with six different teams in a variety of roles, a journey that exposed him to the philosophies of Larry Brown, Doc Rivers, Lawrence Frank and Randy Wittman, among others. So Sullivan fits Davis’s stated desire for everyone on his staff to have a Tar Heel background. But his diverse resume also means he has plenty of experience from which to draw, and current players have already noticed the benefits of having someone with two decades of NBA coaching knowledge on staff. “The addition of Coach Sullivan has been great,” says Armando Bacot. “He’s giving us all advice on the next level and some of the things that they look for, but also trying to get us to incorporate that in our day-to-day life. Like the way pros carry themselves, some of the different workouts and things they do, but also the way they play. We’ve gotten a little insight into that, too, incorporating some of the things he learned into some of the things we do now.”
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BORN & BRED
