HOUSTON — On a team as loose as North Carolina, there’s gotta be a couple of April Fools’ pranks, right?
Duh.
But this time the prankster wasn’t Theo Pinson or Brice Johnson. Nope, it came from a collaboration between the head honcho himself and a team manager.
Before Friday morning’s practice, manager Maggie Boulton, a senior exercise and sports science major, decided that some kind of prank had to go down. It just wouldn’t be right if it didn’t.
So she huddled up with coach Roy Williams and started hatching a plan.
“The team does like to joke around and I’m really goofy myself,” Boulton said. “So I was like, we’ve got to do something. A lot of times it’s really serious around, especially with the tournament, big games coming up. We got to practice and I said to him, ‘you should do one of your things where you go wacko on the guys during practice and scream at them for nothing and make them think they’re running and then it’s like just tell them April Fools or whatever.’”
Flawless, right?
Not quite. The No. 1-seed Tar Heels had a great practice ahead of Saturday night’s national semifinal game against No. 10 seed Syracuse, so there wasn’t much for Williams to nitpick.
So he freelanced a bit and told his players to get on the baseline.
Williams told his players they would be running a set of five 33s, or from endline to endline six times in under 33 seconds. THey could sit out one, but they had to do at least four of the sprints.
The color drained from their faces.
“I was just scared,” freshman Kenny Williams said. “You know when you get ready to run and you start leaning on your knee? I was just doing that because I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
Theo Pinson lined up alongside his teammates, never looking away from Williams’ face. There was no way he was going to make them run the day before biggest game of the season.
“First of all, the guys should’ve known better,” Pinson said. “We have a game the next day. Why would we run four 33s. Why would he make us run five but we had to run four of them before a game and we had a good practice. I figured out the day because my boy JB’s (Joel Berry) birthday is today. I was like, it’s April Fools, so I was praying, talking to Jesus the whole time that it was a joke. It was and I felt a whole lot better about it.”
His prayers were answered when coach yelled to Boulton.
“We lined up and everybody was about to run,” Kennedy Meeks said. “Coach asked Maggie what day it was and she was like, ‘April Fools!’ Everybody was like ahhhhh.”
Good one, Ol’ Roy.
“He has a lot of fun with it,” said Sean May, former player and current director of player personnel. “I think he’s enjoying the moment knowing the group of guys we have here, they’re relishing the moment.”