The old Owen High School is now a middle school

This was Roy Williams 40 years ago.

I was attending a memorial service just outside of Asheville on Sunday and found myself driving through Swannanoa, where Roy Williams began his coaching career. I saw a sign for Charles D. Owen High School, where ol’ Roy was coaching before Dean Smith hired him as an assistant in 1978.

A long driveway led me to a beautiful campus on the top of a hill, with modern buildings and finely manicured playing fields complete with a big gymnasium where the basketball team and other indoor sports played their games. This could not have been the Owen High School of Roy Williams.

I asked someone who was getting out of his car how old this school was, and he said about 10 years. I then asked about the old Owen High School where Roy Williams coached. He told me it was down the road, and was now Owen Middle School.

Less than a mile away, I came to the old Owen High School: a modest one-floor building that was now indeed the community’s middle school. At one end was a building marked “gymnasium.” This is where Williams began his coaching career, and after five successful seasons as head coach gave it up to enter college basketball.

I thought about the crossroads we all face in life, and the one in which Williams traded a well-paying full-time job, where he and Wanda had just built their first home, for the long shot that he could achieve the same status on the college level. His first part-time salary at UNC was $2,700, which he supplemented by traveling around the state hawking basketball calendars.

Williams has long said he would have been happy remaining a high school coach had Smith not called him with a chance to return to his alma mater. Heck, he might have wound up coaching at the new Owen High School at the top of the hill. But he took the leap, and it led him to Kansas and back to Carolina and into the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Roy Williams is a priceless gem for his university. My trip to the mountains and through his past reminded me again how fortunate we are that he came our way.

Roy Williams surpassed his mentor Dean Smith, by winning his third national title as head coach of the Tar Heels. (Todd Melet)

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