Use Your Mentor

Before former UNC guard, Wes Miller was hired as UNCG basketball coach he had to prove himself during an interim period in which he turned the team around.

During his second year as an assistant coach, the athletic director asked him to take over for the rest of the season. The school would conduct a national search for a full-time replacement, and Miller would be a candidate. Miller had dreamed of being a Division I head basketball coach. Just not quite like that. 

"I spend a night just getting thoughts together," said Miller. What are we going to do? How are we going to deal with our players? Then I drove to talk with Coach [Roy] Williams. I was able to talk to him about ideas; get his input," said Miller, who spoke to Williams at least once a week by telephone the rest of the season. 

"I remember immediately thinking that we needed to get better on defense, offense etc. I told him about how I planned on setting a certain tone and he convinced me that that would be the wrong thing to do. He said you're not in a place to set a tone, you're in a place to try to get your team to buy in and believe. That was all of his experience talking, and it really resonated and made sense." Miller returned to UNCG with a new theme to the season: "All in." "He preached that from when he got the job, to the end of the season -- all in," a player said. "If we're going to lose, we're going to lose together. If we're going to win, we're going to win together. And with that, we started noticing all of the small things we had to do.”

—From The April 2013 Issue of The Coaching and Leadership Journal

Hard Work: A Life On and Off the Court