Dean Smith: the teacher of North Carolina

Dean Smith spent decades as the head coach at the University of North Carolina, and he thought of himself as much a teacher as a coach. He built his programme around discipline, unselfishness and the development of the whole person, insisting that his players attend to their education and conduct themselves with integrity. His teams were famous for a team-first ethos in which no individual was allowed to become bigger than the group, a philosophy expressed in small rituals that celebrated the pass as much as the score.

Smith was a genuine tactical innovator. He devised systems to control the tempo of games, popularised methods of team defence, and introduced now-familiar touches such as gesturing to acknowledge the teammate who provided an assist. His approach balanced structure with the intelligence of his players, and it produced consistently excellent teams over an extraordinarily long period. Rivals studied his methods, and many of his ideas filtered outward to become standard parts of how the game is taught and played.

Among the countless players Smith developed was a young Michael Jordan, who arrived at North Carolina as a talented but unproven recruit. It was under Smith that Jordan hit a famous shot to win a national championship as a freshman, an early step on his path to greatness, and Jordan long credited Smith as a formative influence. That Smith could guide the most famous player in the sport within a system that still put the team first says much about the balance he achieved.

Smith's importance reached beyond wins and losses. He used his standing to push for fairness and inclusion, taking a stand on social issues at a time and in a place where doing so carried real risk. Admired for his conscience as much as his coaching, he retired as one of the most successful coaches the college game had known and died in 2015. He is remembered as a teacher whose lessons, on the court and off it, long outlasted any single season or star.