Hubert Davis hit it out of the park Tuesday.
If winning the press conference is important — and in the long run it isn’t — UNC’s new basketball coach showed the side of himself that most people have never seen.
He talked about his faith, which was lost after his mother died when he was a teenager and renewed as a sophomore at Carolina upon making a new commitment to Christianity.
He talked about his family hit by that tragedy in Virginia, the basketball family he joined at UNC and the new family he built upon meeting his wife in Chapel Hill and returning here to raise their children after ending his basketball playing career.
And he talked about a future he will lead as the university’s 20th men’s head basketball coach and the first African-American to hold that position at his alma mater, which diversity-driven Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz termed an important link between the past, present and future.
Understated and underrated as an assistant for Carolina’s latest basketball Hall of Famer, the ebullient Roy Williams, Davis spoke with passion, emotion, urgency and humor.
He said he will rely on the underpinnings of the foundation built by Dean Smith, while recognizing the college game is changing and that he may have to change some things with it.
He has asked Williams to keep his palatial office at the Smith Center for the time being. And he wants Ol’ Roy nearby for advice and counsel when and if he needs it.
He said he will remake the UNC staff to connect the generations that have built and sustained the program’s blue blood status. He hinted that every one of his assistants will have played and/or coached at Carolina under Smith, Bill Guthridge or Williams.
Davis acknowledged there is much work to be done with the team that has not lived up to expectations the last two seasons. He plans to embrace the game as it is today, building a roster to compete at the highest level and play on the biggest stage through relentless recruiting and use of new rules like the transfer portal.
“I am ready to go,” he said on the first day of a new era that we simply call Carolina Basketball.
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