So what kind of a school is UNC anyway?
During his heyday as a Hall of Fame, national championship coach, Dean Smith liked to take the attention away from his team by crediting other Carolina coaches who had also won NCAA titles.
“We’re a women’s soccer school,” he said of Anson Dorrance’s program when it was the most dominant in the country. If he were still alive and sharing the love, Smith would have other choices, also women’s sports.
He would have to start with lacrosse, which is led by Hall of Famer Jenny Levy after 28 years as the only women’s lacrosse coach the Tar Heels have ever had, beginning just before Smith was about to retire in 1997.
Levy’s ladies won their third national championship last spring by going 22-0 after having won 20 straight in 2021 before losing in the Final Four. And Levy just coached the U.S. national team, with six UNC players, to its fourth consecutive world championship with an 8-0 record.
“Does Coach Levy ever lose?” Smith would say.
Before these near-perfect two years, Smith might ask the same of field hockey coach Karen Shelton, who had won three straight NCAA titles to make it nine for her 41-year career. Those Tar Heels play in the stadium named for their coach, just as Dorrance’s team does.
Surely, one of these days Bubba Cunningham will figure out how to give Levy naming rights somewhere since her team also plays on Dorrance Field. Smith, the first coach to have an arena or stadium named for him while he was still working there, might say to Anson, “We’ll call it the Smith-Williams Center if you call it Dorrance-Levy Field.”
Neither Levy nor Shelton has been coaching long enough to get credit for creating the American version of their game as Anson has after winning 22 national titles in his 43 years on the sideline, the first coach in NCAA history to ever win 20 championships in a single sport.
And, of course, those of you who still insist this is a basketball school, Hubert Davis is off to a good start in keeping it that way.
“What about women’s basketball?” Smith, the egalitarian, would remind us. “They’re going to be very good very soon.”
Featured image via Associated Press/Kathy Willens
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