The (Durham) Herald Sun ran an article yesterday that highlights an ugly strategy at UNC: the AD (with the school's support?) seems to be positioning women's BB to take a hit, publicly, while men's BB is "A-OK." Men's BB is, afterall, supremely sacred to the Heels.
So Ol' Roy gets a contract extension this past month, while Ol' Sylvia prepares for her apparent ouster, already losing most of her starters to transfers. Un-be-lievable. That institution is so far gone, it's amazing. Good 'ol boys rule in Chapel Hill, oblivious to reality and with no shame.
Anyway, the strategy is drawing criticism from within the Heel family, and deservedly so. Funniest part: both men's and women's BB (as well as football, and a few other "Olympic" sport teams) are identified in the NCAA's NOA, as being party to five major infractions, which will likely bring major sanctions/punishment against all of them, and equally and rightfully so.
Watching them turn on each other is entertaining. . . . See below for the article or view online at: http://www.heraldsun.com/news/showc...-new-deal-for-UNCs-Hatchell-angers-supporters
Lack of new deal for UNC's Hatchell angers supporters
Jul. 02, 2015 @ 04:36 PM
John McCann
CHAPEL HILL — The contracts of both head basketball coaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were coming due in 2018.
UNC athletics director Bubba Cunningham announced in June that he’d added a couple of years to the deal of Roy Williams, the UNC men’s basketball coach. Williams deserved it, Cunningham said.
Cunningham also extended the contracts of two UNC coaches who lead Olympic sports teams.
But there’s no new deal for UNC women’s basketball coach Sylvia Hatchell. It’s not sitting well with some of her supporters.
Cunningham said he’s not going to talk about the university's contractual arrangement with Hatchell or, for that matter, any of the other 20 or so coaches who haven't received extensions, according to a UNC spokesperson.
But Cunningham and UNC Chancellor Carol Folt have gotten critiqued by at least two of Hatchell’s longtime friends who in writing said the coach and her basketball program have become the sacrificial lambs to atone for the university’s sins.
UNC officials have been preparing a response to the NCAA’s allegations against the school. Among the charges is a lack of institutional control by leaders there. That takes into account classes created and overseen by Deborah Crowder, a secretary in what was UNC’s Department of African and African-American Studies. Athletes and non-athletes alike who took the classes, which required no attendance, would pass the courses by turning in single term papers that Crowder would grade with a very light touch, according to an investigation led by former federal prosecutor Kenneth Wainstein. The main idea was keeping UNC ballplayers eligible to keep suiting up for the Tar Heels, according to the report by Wainstein’s team.
An email trail followed by Wainstein's team uncovered a real cozy relationship between Crowder and Jan Boxill, who was the academics adviser for the UNC women’s basketball program.
While the NCAA has not accused any current UNC coaches of wrongdoing, it has taken issue with Boxill’s involvement with Hatchell’s players, which included not only steering players toward the irregular classes but also suggesting to Crowder the grades the student-athletes needed in order to remain eligible.
Hatchell said she doesn’t know anything about that.
But the coach said she indeed knows Boxill.
“I have 29 years of a relationship with a person that I think the world of. Why do you think her peers were so adamant about her being the head of the faculty? All I can go on is my experience and my gut feeling,” Hatchell said about Boxill in October. “There’s no one I’ve worked with on this campus that’s more ethical than Jan Boxill.”
Boxill resigned from UNC in February. She was a philosophy professor there and at one point was the director of UNC’s Parr Center for Ethics.
“Jan’s my friend, and she’ll always be my friend,” Hatchell said. “I don’t turn my back on people.”
Hatchell’s other friends are suggesting that her relationship with Boxill has plenty to do with why she didn’t get a contract extension.
“She had absolutely nothing to do with the NCAA academic situation. Jan Boxill and all the others named in the report and allegations were academic people,” said Dianne Glover, who is a friend of Hatchell’s and works in UNC’s Department of Surgery.
The NCAA is expected to punish UNC. The Boxill-Hatchell relationship has the UNC women’s basketball program looking like it could take a serious hit.
Anyone who's heard Boxill speak knows what a gifted orator she is, Durham’s Albert Long explained recently between sips of his coffee at Chick-fil-A on Hillsborough Road. He recalled a time when he heard her speak during an event for the UNC women’s basketball team, and Boxill was engaging and charming and certainly convincing.
Long said that’s how Hatchell got snowed.
“She was a person who put all her trust in an individual who was her friend and the chairman of the ethics committee and a well-known, respected professor,” Long said.
Long is no ordinary UNC fan. He played football, basketball, baseball and ran track for the Tar Heels in the early 1950s. He’s the only four-sport letterman in the history of the Atlantic Coast Conference. Long loves UNC women’s basketball and is particularly crazy about Hatchell, his friend.
“I guarantee you that every one of Sylvia’s peers who know her personally will tell you what a women of high integrity she is and a woman of strong faith,” Long said.
Yet Cunningham is treating Hatchell like she was in on the irregular classes, like she’s Boxill, Long suggested.
“What really upsets me is the very same reasons Bubba Cunningham mentioned why he extended Roy’s contract fits Sylvia exactly,” Long said.
When Cunningham announced Williams’ contract extension, he said, “His results on the court over 27 years as a head coach are among the most accomplished in the history of the sport, but his love for the University of North Carolina and the way he cares for his students are truly unmatched.
“Roy is a man of character and integrity, and I have great respect for the way he leads our basketball program.”
Long has issues with that.
Among active coaches in women’s college basketball, Hatchell has more wins than any of them, including the great Geno Auriemma. Granted, he’s won 10 national championships at the University of Connecticut. But the point is Auriemma arrived at UConn in 1985 and has 917 wins. Hatchell showed up in Chapel Hill in 1986 and has 961 wins, including the national championship she delivered to UNC in 1994. She got 272 of those wins during her 11 years coaching at what used to be Francis Marion College, in Florence, South Carolina. Only retired Tennessee coach Pat Summitt, with 1,098 career victories, has more wins than Hatchell.
In 2011,when Dick Baddour was UNC’s athletics director, he extended the contracts of both Williams and Hatchell to 2018. The deal Cunningham gave Williams would keep him in Chapel Hill through 2020.
Yet Hatchell didn’t get a contract extension. UNC women’s lacrosse coach Jenny Levy got one after her Tar Heels were runners-up in the NCAA Tournament. UNC women’s tennis coach Brian Kalbas got one after sophomore Jamie Loeb won the 2015 NCAA championship, UNC’s first NCAA women’s tennis individual title.
But no new deal for the UNC’s women’s basketball coach.
“Why would her contract not be renewed, as was Roy Williams’?” Glover asked.
One of the finest all-around athletes UNC ever produced, Long has problems with how Cunningham is handling Hatchell’s situation.
“I am a Tar Heel born and a Tar Heel bred, and when I die, I’m a Tar Heel dead,” Long said. “However, I am thoroughly disgusted with the way the athletics department has treated Coach Hatchell, and Bubba Cunningham and I are good friends — that is, until he reads this article.”
Long smiled when he said that, but the grin masked his frustration regarding the treatment of Hatchell. It’s no way to treat somebody like her who is in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame just like Williams, he said.
“They are throwing her under the bus,” Long said.
There is language in Hatchell’s contract — her base salary is $361,000 a year — that could be grounds for her dismissal if someone either on the women’s basketball staff or any of her players violated an NCAA standard about which she should have been aware.
“She is going down with the ship, and nobody in the athletics department is even throwing her a life jacket,” Long said.
What already looks awful is Hatchell having lost her entire recruiting class from 2013. That was the top class in the nation.
The best among those four players is Diamond DeShields, the national freshman of the year in 2013-14 whose mother said the situation at Chapel Hill was a bad fit for her daughter. Hatchell was fighting cancer and took that season off when DeShields led UNC to the NCAA Tournament quarterfinals. Hatchell barely got to work with her. By the time Hatchell’s health improved enough for her to return to coaching, DeShields had transferred. She's at the University of Tennessee.
After this past season, Jessica Washington said she was leaving to find more playing time at another school. She's landed at Kansas. Allisha Gray and Stephanie Mavunga, whose decisions to explore other options were announced in June, haven’t said why they wanted out of Hatchell’s program. Gray transferred to the University of South Carolina.
“Simply stated, she lost her star players because of something she did not do and had no control over,” Glover said.
The timing of it all is critical, according to Jacqueline Koss, a friend of Hatchell’s who said she has served as a director of women’s sports on the collegiate level.
“Granting releases to student-athletes in a situation such as this has a viral effect,” Koss said. “Granting one release based on allegations, substantiated or not, initiates panic that spreads and can decimate the program.”
Koss, an adjunct faculty member at Vanderbilt University, has shared her concerns in writing with Cunningham. She said he was nice enough to respond and did so in a professional way. But Koss warned Cunningham that his treatment of Hatchell is insulting and could be a violation of Title IX legislation in place to ensure equitable treatment of females in sports.
“Coach Hatchell took her team to the Sweet 16 this past year, which parallels what Roy Williams accomplished with the men’s program,” Koss said. “The lack of a contract extension to Coach Hatchell is reminiscent of athletic department actions before the passage and enactment of Title IX. UNC might want to rethink these questionable courses of action.
“Without a contract extension, you are inhibiting and impeding an award-winning coach, and, moreover, you are demanding that a coach put together a successful team under negative circumstances that you have created.”
Koss said she tended to Hatchell while she fought for her life battling leukemia.
But now, Glover said, it’s like Cunningham is trying to take the basketball life out of Hatchell
“Bubba Cunningham and the university (are) making her and women’s basketball the sacrificial lamb for something that has been proven she had absolutely nothing to do with,” Glover said.
Koss wondered, “How did an investigation that centered upon the men’s basketball and football programs land on the doorstep of women’s basketball?”
Herald-Sun sports writer John McCann is @johntmccann on Twitter.
So Ol' Roy gets a contract extension this past month, while Ol' Sylvia prepares for her apparent ouster, already losing most of her starters to transfers. Un-be-lievable. That institution is so far gone, it's amazing. Good 'ol boys rule in Chapel Hill, oblivious to reality and with no shame.
Anyway, the strategy is drawing criticism from within the Heel family, and deservedly so. Funniest part: both men's and women's BB (as well as football, and a few other "Olympic" sport teams) are identified in the NCAA's NOA, as being party to five major infractions, which will likely bring major sanctions/punishment against all of them, and equally and rightfully so.
Watching them turn on each other is entertaining. . . . See below for the article or view online at: http://www.heraldsun.com/news/showc...-new-deal-for-UNCs-Hatchell-angers-supporters
Lack of new deal for UNC's Hatchell angers supporters
Jul. 02, 2015 @ 04:36 PM
John McCann
CHAPEL HILL — The contracts of both head basketball coaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were coming due in 2018.
UNC athletics director Bubba Cunningham announced in June that he’d added a couple of years to the deal of Roy Williams, the UNC men’s basketball coach. Williams deserved it, Cunningham said.
Cunningham also extended the contracts of two UNC coaches who lead Olympic sports teams.
But there’s no new deal for UNC women’s basketball coach Sylvia Hatchell. It’s not sitting well with some of her supporters.
Cunningham said he’s not going to talk about the university's contractual arrangement with Hatchell or, for that matter, any of the other 20 or so coaches who haven't received extensions, according to a UNC spokesperson.
But Cunningham and UNC Chancellor Carol Folt have gotten critiqued by at least two of Hatchell’s longtime friends who in writing said the coach and her basketball program have become the sacrificial lambs to atone for the university’s sins.
UNC officials have been preparing a response to the NCAA’s allegations against the school. Among the charges is a lack of institutional control by leaders there. That takes into account classes created and overseen by Deborah Crowder, a secretary in what was UNC’s Department of African and African-American Studies. Athletes and non-athletes alike who took the classes, which required no attendance, would pass the courses by turning in single term papers that Crowder would grade with a very light touch, according to an investigation led by former federal prosecutor Kenneth Wainstein. The main idea was keeping UNC ballplayers eligible to keep suiting up for the Tar Heels, according to the report by Wainstein’s team.
An email trail followed by Wainstein's team uncovered a real cozy relationship between Crowder and Jan Boxill, who was the academics adviser for the UNC women’s basketball program.
While the NCAA has not accused any current UNC coaches of wrongdoing, it has taken issue with Boxill’s involvement with Hatchell’s players, which included not only steering players toward the irregular classes but also suggesting to Crowder the grades the student-athletes needed in order to remain eligible.
Hatchell said she doesn’t know anything about that.
But the coach said she indeed knows Boxill.
“I have 29 years of a relationship with a person that I think the world of. Why do you think her peers were so adamant about her being the head of the faculty? All I can go on is my experience and my gut feeling,” Hatchell said about Boxill in October. “There’s no one I’ve worked with on this campus that’s more ethical than Jan Boxill.”
Boxill resigned from UNC in February. She was a philosophy professor there and at one point was the director of UNC’s Parr Center for Ethics.
“Jan’s my friend, and she’ll always be my friend,” Hatchell said. “I don’t turn my back on people.”
Hatchell’s other friends are suggesting that her relationship with Boxill has plenty to do with why she didn’t get a contract extension.
“She had absolutely nothing to do with the NCAA academic situation. Jan Boxill and all the others named in the report and allegations were academic people,” said Dianne Glover, who is a friend of Hatchell’s and works in UNC’s Department of Surgery.
The NCAA is expected to punish UNC. The Boxill-Hatchell relationship has the UNC women’s basketball program looking like it could take a serious hit.
Anyone who's heard Boxill speak knows what a gifted orator she is, Durham’s Albert Long explained recently between sips of his coffee at Chick-fil-A on Hillsborough Road. He recalled a time when he heard her speak during an event for the UNC women’s basketball team, and Boxill was engaging and charming and certainly convincing.
Long said that’s how Hatchell got snowed.
“She was a person who put all her trust in an individual who was her friend and the chairman of the ethics committee and a well-known, respected professor,” Long said.
Long is no ordinary UNC fan. He played football, basketball, baseball and ran track for the Tar Heels in the early 1950s. He’s the only four-sport letterman in the history of the Atlantic Coast Conference. Long loves UNC women’s basketball and is particularly crazy about Hatchell, his friend.
“I guarantee you that every one of Sylvia’s peers who know her personally will tell you what a women of high integrity she is and a woman of strong faith,” Long said.
Yet Cunningham is treating Hatchell like she was in on the irregular classes, like she’s Boxill, Long suggested.
“What really upsets me is the very same reasons Bubba Cunningham mentioned why he extended Roy’s contract fits Sylvia exactly,” Long said.
When Cunningham announced Williams’ contract extension, he said, “His results on the court over 27 years as a head coach are among the most accomplished in the history of the sport, but his love for the University of North Carolina and the way he cares for his students are truly unmatched.
“Roy is a man of character and integrity, and I have great respect for the way he leads our basketball program.”
Long has issues with that.
Among active coaches in women’s college basketball, Hatchell has more wins than any of them, including the great Geno Auriemma. Granted, he’s won 10 national championships at the University of Connecticut. But the point is Auriemma arrived at UConn in 1985 and has 917 wins. Hatchell showed up in Chapel Hill in 1986 and has 961 wins, including the national championship she delivered to UNC in 1994. She got 272 of those wins during her 11 years coaching at what used to be Francis Marion College, in Florence, South Carolina. Only retired Tennessee coach Pat Summitt, with 1,098 career victories, has more wins than Hatchell.
In 2011,when Dick Baddour was UNC’s athletics director, he extended the contracts of both Williams and Hatchell to 2018. The deal Cunningham gave Williams would keep him in Chapel Hill through 2020.
Yet Hatchell didn’t get a contract extension. UNC women’s lacrosse coach Jenny Levy got one after her Tar Heels were runners-up in the NCAA Tournament. UNC women’s tennis coach Brian Kalbas got one after sophomore Jamie Loeb won the 2015 NCAA championship, UNC’s first NCAA women’s tennis individual title.
But no new deal for the UNC’s women’s basketball coach.
“Why would her contract not be renewed, as was Roy Williams’?” Glover asked.
One of the finest all-around athletes UNC ever produced, Long has problems with how Cunningham is handling Hatchell’s situation.
“I am a Tar Heel born and a Tar Heel bred, and when I die, I’m a Tar Heel dead,” Long said. “However, I am thoroughly disgusted with the way the athletics department has treated Coach Hatchell, and Bubba Cunningham and I are good friends — that is, until he reads this article.”
Long smiled when he said that, but the grin masked his frustration regarding the treatment of Hatchell. It’s no way to treat somebody like her who is in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame just like Williams, he said.
“They are throwing her under the bus,” Long said.
There is language in Hatchell’s contract — her base salary is $361,000 a year — that could be grounds for her dismissal if someone either on the women’s basketball staff or any of her players violated an NCAA standard about which she should have been aware.
“She is going down with the ship, and nobody in the athletics department is even throwing her a life jacket,” Long said.
What already looks awful is Hatchell having lost her entire recruiting class from 2013. That was the top class in the nation.
The best among those four players is Diamond DeShields, the national freshman of the year in 2013-14 whose mother said the situation at Chapel Hill was a bad fit for her daughter. Hatchell was fighting cancer and took that season off when DeShields led UNC to the NCAA Tournament quarterfinals. Hatchell barely got to work with her. By the time Hatchell’s health improved enough for her to return to coaching, DeShields had transferred. She's at the University of Tennessee.
After this past season, Jessica Washington said she was leaving to find more playing time at another school. She's landed at Kansas. Allisha Gray and Stephanie Mavunga, whose decisions to explore other options were announced in June, haven’t said why they wanted out of Hatchell’s program. Gray transferred to the University of South Carolina.
“Simply stated, she lost her star players because of something she did not do and had no control over,” Glover said.
The timing of it all is critical, according to Jacqueline Koss, a friend of Hatchell’s who said she has served as a director of women’s sports on the collegiate level.
“Granting releases to student-athletes in a situation such as this has a viral effect,” Koss said. “Granting one release based on allegations, substantiated or not, initiates panic that spreads and can decimate the program.”
Koss, an adjunct faculty member at Vanderbilt University, has shared her concerns in writing with Cunningham. She said he was nice enough to respond and did so in a professional way. But Koss warned Cunningham that his treatment of Hatchell is insulting and could be a violation of Title IX legislation in place to ensure equitable treatment of females in sports.
“Coach Hatchell took her team to the Sweet 16 this past year, which parallels what Roy Williams accomplished with the men’s program,” Koss said. “The lack of a contract extension to Coach Hatchell is reminiscent of athletic department actions before the passage and enactment of Title IX. UNC might want to rethink these questionable courses of action.
“Without a contract extension, you are inhibiting and impeding an award-winning coach, and, moreover, you are demanding that a coach put together a successful team under negative circumstances that you have created.”
Koss said she tended to Hatchell while she fought for her life battling leukemia.
But now, Glover said, it’s like Cunningham is trying to take the basketball life out of Hatchell
“Bubba Cunningham and the university (are) making her and women’s basketball the sacrificial lamb for something that has been proven she had absolutely nothing to do with,” Glover said.
Koss wondered, “How did an investigation that centered upon the men’s basketball and football programs land on the doorstep of women’s basketball?”
Herald-Sun sports writer John McCann is @johntmccann on Twitter.
Last edited:
