Much has changed in a year. Last summer, Hubert Davis spent his first practices with his brand new team introducing his on- and off-court philosophies. Everything felt new.

This summer, when the Tar Heels gathered as a team for the handful of NCAA-allowed summer practices, they did so as a known quantity. Davis won multiple coaching awards in his first season as Carolina’s head coach. The Tar Heels return four of the five starters from a team that was one win away from a national championship.

Until the final month of the campaign, virtually no one noticed how much the Tar Heels improved last season. Even the win at Cameron Indoor Stadium was largely seen as a fluke by outsiders … until Carolina sent home defending national champion Baylor in the NCAA Tournament round of 32.

Those accomplishments mean this year’s Tar Heels will enter the 2022-23 season with lofty outside expectations. On the very first day of summer practice, Davis reminded them that nothing has changed from his first season in terms of his requirements of the team.

“I’m not worried about all that stuff about being the number one team in the country,” he told the Tar Heels. “What I want is that there is nothing soft and nothing passive about anything we do. We’re going to punch first.”

That’s a mindset that was created over the course of Davis’s first season as head coach. Somehow, in the heat of a college basketball season at one of the nation’s most-watched programs, he managed to help the Tar Heels find the balance between competing on every single possession and enjoying every single moment.

It happened in games like the national championship, under the most pressure possible. Needing a stop in the game’s final minutes, the Tar Heels set up in man-to-man defense. And as the Jayhawks brought the ball frontcourt, there was Hubert Davis on the Carolina sideline, clapping his hands, an enormous smile on his face.

That type of calm under pressure and enjoyment of the moment defined the first season of the Hubert Davis era.

“Basketball is fun for me,” Davis said. “Other than my wife and kids, that’s always been my happy place. It doesn’t matter what the scenario is. I’m not stressed, I’m not worried, I’m not nervous. My experience has been that whether what happens in a basketball game is good or bad, something good is going to come of it. I believe that because that’s what has happened in my life. So I really am having fun on the sideline.”

“When you see your head coach over there clapping and smiling in that type of situation, it makes a difference,” said RJ Davis. “It makes it more fun to play for him. He has that energy like he’s on the court with you, and you feed off that as a player.”

Maintaining the head coach’s approach helped restore Carolina basketball to what Davis always believed was its rightful place among the nation’s elite. The in-season chatter about whether Carolina was a “soft” team wasn’t just disrespectful to the current squad. Under Davis, they realized it was also an unfair commentary on the program’s past.

One national college basketball writer released a video during the nonconference portion of the schedule breaking down the different ways he believed Carolina was a soft team. Players fumed, and relished the opportunity to see that same writer at the Final Four in New Orleans. Armando Bacot even mentioned it from the podium during a New Orleans press conference, pointing out the writer and reminding him of his comments.

“I actually had more I wanted to say to him,” Bacot said later. “Look, we’ve got coaches on our staff who were coached by Dean Smith and Bill Guthridge. When you call us soft, it’s like calling them soft. It’s like calling Michael Jordan soft. We may not be good. We may not be able to shoot. We might play badly in a game. But don’t call North Carolina soft. That’s never a word that should be associated with this program, and I hope we showed that to people this year.”

Prior to this season, no one on the Carolina roster had ever played in a Final Four. Davis helped get them there. He showed them what it took to advance in the NCAA Tournament, how precious the possessions are when you’re trying to move into the next round of the postseason. That will matter this season, when they’ll not only have to play in those big games, but have to do so with much weightier expectations. Experience doesn’t cure everything; just ask the 2022 Baylor and UCLA teams, both of which had plenty of experience but lost to a hotter Carolina squad. But it helps.

“I was standing there with Armando before the national championship game during the national anthem, and I was like, ‘Look around, we’re really here,’” said Leaky Black. “Making it to the Final Four is the Carolina standard. You can’t describe that experience to anyone. You have to walk out on the court and see the 70,000 people for yourself, and look in the stands and see how proud your family is.”

After two years of unusual settings and empty arenas, the 2021-22 season also restored the bond between the program and the community. Franklin Street was buzzing on gameday again. Undergraduates packed the student section. Tickets were hot
commodities.

“It felt like we revived the campus and the town of Chapel Hill,” Bacot said. “I remember going to Franklin Street that Sunday after the win at Cameron, and it was packed. Everywhere any of the players went, we got recognized everywhere. We had never really experienced this type of love before, we had just heard other players and coaches talk about it. It felt like a turning point in Carolina history.”

Because of the positive experience and the good vibes over the final month of the season, it’s easy to lose perspective and believe that the outcome of the 2021-22 season was simple. Just change an offensive strategy here, smile on the sideline there, and that’s how you make a national championship contender.

It was never that easy. Hubert Davis cried the night of the national championship loss to Kansas and cried again the next morning when he thought about the events of the past 12 months. It wasn’t just the defeat. It was the incredible emotional swings that had accompanied the last 365 days.

Davis had often quoted Proverbs 4:25 to his team, and he’d tried hard to follow it as well: “Keep your eyes straight ahead; ignore all sideshow distractions.” Once the season was finally over, it was his first opportunity to actually internalize everything that had happened over the previous year.

Being the head coach means something is always happening, and games are often the last refuge from everything else. It means smiling for a photo every time you go into a restaurant. It means everyone needs just “a couple of minutes,” from first thing in the morning to last thing at night.

Being the head coach means there are no breaks. Even this spring, sitting in his office recounting some of his favorite moments from the just-completed season, Davis was interrupted to get his thoughts on a potential issue with the 2022-23 team. It never stops.

“It’s been really hard,” Davis said. “And it’s been really emotional. You’re disappointed because you lost the national championship game. But look at what they accomplished to get there, and that is complete joy. This was probably the hardest year of my life. It’s exhausting. I don’t know how long it will take to unpack what happened this season.”