Dean Smith

Dean Smith (born February 28, 1931, Emporia, Kansas, U.S.—died February 7, 2015, Chapel Hill, North Carolina) was an American collegiate basketball coach at the University of North Carolina (1961–97) who, with 879 career victories, retired as the most successful men’s collegiate basketball coach; his record was broken by Bob Knight in 2007.

Smith earned a degree in mathematics (1953) from the University of Kansas, where he played basketball under the legendary Phog Allen. Smith was a reserve guard on the Kansas team that won the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) title in 1952. He served briefly as an assistant coach on Allen’s staff before joining the U.S. Air Force in 1954. He was as an assistant coach at the United States Air Force Academy until 1958, when he joined the coaching staff of Frank McGuire at the University of North Carolina. In 1961 Smith became North Carolina’s head coach, inheriting a program that had won the NCAA championship in 1957 under McGuire, who left to coach in the professional National Basketball Association (NBA) after the school received sanctions for recruiting violations.

Smith struggled in his first few seasons, but under his guidance North Carolina became one of collegiate basketball’s elite programs, winning at least 20 games for 30 of his final 31 seasons (including the last 27 consecutively). Smith led North Carolina to 11 appearances at the Final Four (the semifinals of the NCAA tournament) and two NCAA championships (1982 and 1993); his team also won the National Invitation Tournament championship in 1971. He coached the U.S. men’s basketball team to a gold medal in the 1976 Olympics and was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1983. (In 2005 his record for most career victories in NCAA basketball was broken by women’s coach Pat Summitt.)

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A master innovator, Smith was perhaps best identified with the four-corner offense (developed earlier by John McLendon), which was designed to run time off the game clock to preserve a small lead; this strategy was so successful that it later led to the adoption of a shot clock in collegiate basketball. Other tactics that Smith devised included the run-and-jump defense (a full-court pressure defense that involved players switching defensive assignments on the run) and the foul-line huddle (in which one player would relay instructions from Smith to the other players before a foul shot). Hallmarks of his teams were that players acknowledged a pass from a teammate after scoring a basket and used their fist to signal that they were tired and needed a substitute.

More than 95 percent of Smith’s players earned their college degrees, and many of them, including Michael Jordan and James Worthy, went on to become standouts in the NBA. Others, such as Larry Brown and Roy Williams, became renowned coaches at the collegiate or professional level. Smith was also known for his strong commitment to racial integration, becoming one of the first white coaches in the South to recruit African American players in the 1960s. In 1986 the Tar Heels’ new home arena was named the Dean E. Smith Center in his honour. He was the author of Basketball: Multiple Offense and Defense (1982), A Coach’s Life (1999; with John Kilgo and Sally Jenkins), and The Carolina Way: Leadership Lessons from a Life of Coaching (2004; with Gerald D. Bell and John Kilgo). In 2013 Smith was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.