Coaching Legend Roy Williams was a Mentor and More to Cal's Mark Fox

Fox Spent One Season Shadowing Williams at Kansas at the Outset of His Career

While working toward his master’s degree in sports administration/sports psychology at Kansas University 25 years ago, Mark Fox also got an education in coaching from one of the game’s best ever.

Roy Williams retired as coach at North Carolina on Thursday after 33-year career during which he won 903 games -- fourth-most ever -- directed his teams to nine Final Fours and won three national championships.

Fox spent one of those seasons assisting Williams, but mostly learning the coaching trade from him.

Williams was coaching at Kansas in 1995-96 when Fox approached him about joining the staff in some capacity. A quarter century later, Cal’s coach remains grateful for the opportunity Williams gave him and the friendship the two forged in the meantime.

“Coach Williams let me just come to practice every day and observe. I learned a lot,” Fox said. “He was so efficient as a teacher, so meticulous. At that time he was one of the best coaches in the game and obviously went on to have a Hall of Fame career.”

Fox called Williams “a great mentor,” but it’s clear their association goes beyond that.

When Williams announced his retirement this week Fox reached out with a text message.

“You weren’t good, you weren’t great. You were one of a kind,” he told him.

Fox, who grew up in Kansas, later spent six seasons as an assistant at Kansas State. He landed his first head coaching assignment at Nevada in 2004, spent nine seasons at coach at Georgia and just completed his second year at Cal.

But he looks back fondly on the season he spent soaking in everything Williams showed him during that one season at Kansas.

“I sill have the notebook,” Fox said.

Fox said the biggest thing he took from the experience was the way Williams organized his practices, a style he learned under his mentor, Dean Smith.

“He had a very, very structured way of approaching practice. Obviously he learned from coach Smith, who was the best at that time,” Fox said. “We’ve tried to model that ever since I left — that level of efficiency in practice. It allowed me to see him get a lot of things done, maybe more things done in two hours than most people do because of his efficiency.”

Williams, already in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, assemble a record of 418-101 in 15 seasons at Kansas. His Jayhawks’ teams played in the NCAA tournament 14 of those seasons and made it to the Final Four on four occasions but never won a national title.

When Smith retired, Williams was the obvious choice to replace him at Chapel Hill. By his second season at UNC, in 2004-05, Williams and the Tar Heels won an NCAA crown. They went on to win two more titles, in 2009 and 2017.

Cover photo of Roy Williams by Rob Kinnan, USA Today

Follow Jeff Faraudo of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jefffaraudo