Point Guard From Another Planet - Steve Nash

The Phoenix Suns' Steve Nash doesn't fit any NBA mold, yet the Canadian Kid is following up his MVP season with an even better one

When considering the phenomenon that is Steve Nash, there is the temptation to present him as an NBA novelty act. He is a small man in a big man's game, a white man in a black man's game, a Canadian man in an American man's game.  Even at age 31, with 177 pounds packed evenly but not buffly onto a 6'2" frame, Nash looks like the dead-end kid who never gets picked for the hoops game and ends up hustling bets at the corner pool hall.

But any story about Nash, the Phoenix Suns' point guard who has his team fighting for the best record in the Western Conference (despite playing all season without 6'10" superstar-in-ascension Amaré Stoudemire), must begin in that most conventional of basketball settings (a gymnasium) with his working on that most conventional of skills (shooting). It is 45 minutes before the Suns are to play the Golden State Warriors at US Airways Center in Phoenix, and Nash is the only player in the team's practice gym. He shoots, equipment manager Jay Gaspar retrieves.

Nash begins near the basket, then gradually moves farther away, firing jumper after righthanded jumper with what Dallas Mavericks assistant coach Del Harris calls "absolutely perfect mechanics.” Next Nash launches a dozen runners, some off his left foot and some, unconventionally, off his right. He moves through his practice ritual according to some internal rhythm ("I change spots when it feels right," he says), eventually stepping behind the three-point arc (from where he makes 17 of 24) and finally settling in at the free throw line (making 11 in a row). Then he signals to Gaspar that he is finished.

"Any idea how many you shot?" a reporter asks him.

"No," says Nash.

"A hundred sixty-three. Any idea how many you made?"

He ponders this for a moment. "A hundred thirty?" he says.

"Nah," comes the reply. "A hundred twenty-eight."

Nash shrugs. That's about average.

Aside from his nonsuperstar appearance and his north-of-the-border upbringing, Stephen John Nash--the reigning league MVP--was not even considered an elite player going into last season. In July 2004, when he signed a six-year, $60 million free-agent deal that swept him out of Dallas and into the Valley of the Sun, the consensus was that he would make Phoenix, 29-53 the previous season, a little better and maybe, just maybe, get the team into the playoffs.

But when second-year Suns coach Mike D'Antoni handed him the keys and told him to run all the red lights, Nash had a season that was truly transformative, for himself and his team. He shot a career-high 50.2% from the floor in scoring 15.5 points per game, but more important he led the league in assists (a career-best 11.5 per game) and ignited an offense that became the talk of the NBA. Winning 31 of its first 35 games, Phoenix finished with a league-best 62-20 record, bowing to the eventual NBA champion San Antonio Spurs in five games in the Western Conference finals. That's why the Maurice Podoloff Trophy landed in the arms of a kid who grew up playing soccer and, of course, hockey in Victoria, B.C.

Which raises a question: Did the man make the system, or did the system make the man?

"When a guy can make plays 80 to 85 percent of the time," says Milwaukee Bucks point guard Maurice Williams, beginning a long paean to Nash (abridged version follows), "when he can pass, he can make runners, floaters, and ... he'll burn you with a jumper too.... I mean, he's awesome. The system doesn't work without Steve Nash."

Gilbert Arenas, the Washington Wizards' point guard, offers a mild dissent. In the Phoenix system, he says, Nash "gets to control the game with his ball movement. He is a probe--he can look for his teammates, shoot the three. The system helps what he does."

Nash's play over the first three months of this season provided the answer: Yes. Although Nash's primary receiver last season, the fleet and high-flying Stoudemire, has yet to play a minute because of left-knee surgery, and opponents had all summer to plot ways to thwart the Suns' fast break, Phoenix was the Pacific Division leader again with a 26-13 record through last Saturday's games, third best in the West. Nash was averaging more minutes than last season (37.1 to 34.3), more points (18.7 to 15.5) and almost as many assists (11.4 to 11.5) and puts the team on his back, always keeping his head up, always looking for seams and always finding the open man--sometimes with an outrageous wraparound pass delivered with his off hand.

Another unusual aspect of Nash's game is the amount of dribbling he does. But that's a good thing too because he doesn't go side to side so much as he is constantly on the attack. He may be the best ever at driving toward the hole and, finding his way blocked, continuing under the basket, like a bus passenger who doesn't like the look of his stop and keeps on going. "The beauty of Steve holding it," says Raja Bell, Nash's starting backcourtmate, "is that you know he's holding it to help you out. There are times when I say, 'O.K., do you want me to float up the lane or back cut?' And he'll always have an answer. You learn every day to be ready for when that ball hits you in the hands because--trust me--it will hit you in the hands."

When Nash is not pulling up beyond the arc (his three-point accuracy is above 40%), he can corkscrew his body to get off a reverse in the lane or launch a deadly fadeaway. And because his head is always up, he can find a good space from which to shoot even as he's driving at top speed. Thus his shots are rarely blocked, though he's not a great leaper.

Defensively, Nash is hardly a stopper, but he's gotten better at keeping opponents in front of him.  All told, last season's MVP might be playing even better this season. "You could make that case," says D'Antoni, "but it seemed like Steve went 60 games last year before he made a mistake, so I'm not going to say it."

Nash also admits that last season's MVP award is sometimes on his mind. "People have always told me I'd fall on my face, that I wouldn't make it this far. But here I am."

And here he is after a practice, grinning as he watches a trash-talk-fueled shooting contest between Bell and gunning guard Eddie House. For someone who's the center of attention during the game, Nash skirts the perimeter of the Suns' social circle. Whenever there's a break in practice, for instance, Nash takes off and shoots, working his way around the gym's baskets.

14 years ago when, as a senior at St. Michael's University High in Victoria, he made the outrageous decision that he would play in the NBA. Nash had by then abandoned his first loves, soccer and hockey, because basketball had seized his soul. "I happened to have a group of friends who loved basketball more than the so-called Canadian sports," he says. "At the same time the NBA was really, really big, with Magic, Michael and Larry. I totally fed into the game and totally fed into the hype machine. I don't know if it would have happened for me at any other time. Maybe I would've kept on playing soccer and hockey."

"I remember looking out the window of our house, watching Steve shooting free throws in the rain," says Martin, a midfielder for the Vancouver Whitecaps in the United Soccer League's First Division. "I didn't do that. Look, I have no regrets. I played in three World Cup qualifiers. I had my chances. But with that little extra drive--that Steve drive--who knows?"

No one, least of all Steve, can explain the origins of the Steve drive. His father, John, a retired marketing manager for a financial institution, played semipro soccer in his native England and also in South Africa (where Steve was born). But he was, and is, Steve says, "a rather laid-back guy who never pushed me at all." His mother, Jean, a former special-needs assistant at an elementary school, supported her sons in sports but was no soccer mom. Though Steve's basketball buds loved the game, none of them ever thought about taking it all the way. "How do you explain where drive comes from?" asks Martin. "You can't."

Steve knew his dream was outlandish, but along the way he got bits of encouragement. After a summer basketball camp Eli Pasquale, a Canadian point guard who had been a late cut by the Seattle SuperSonics in 1984, drove a teenage Nash home one day and said, without prompting, "If you want to make it, really make it, have a plan. Decide right now. If I had decided at your age, dedicated all I had to making it, I would be in the NBA right now."

Recalls Nash, "That was a wake-up call."

It's one thing to have a dream, another to realize it. Nash knew he would have to get into a Division I program in the U.S., but he couldn't get any schools interested, even though he more than held his own in all-star tournaments against top American high school players. Syracuse and Washington, his dream schools, didn't even respond to his letters. "I don't want this to sound egotistical," says Nash, "but what I heard later was that scouts and coaches just didn't believe what they were seeing. It was too weird. A recruiter would see this average-sized white kid, and then he'd have to go back to campus and say, 'Hey, I saw this kid from Canada,' and before he finished, everyone would say, 'Hey, we got a thousand kids like that.'"

Finally Dick Davey, then an assistant at Santa Clara (he became the head coach in Nash's freshman year), believed what he saw and helped Nash get a scholarship. "It felt good, and I owe so much to Santa Clara," says Nash, "but honestly? I wish it would have been Syracuse or Washington." At first, though, even the West Coast Conference seemed to be too big a jump for Nash, who struggled just to get the ball upcourt in pickup games against the Broncos' starting point guard, John Woolery, a long-armed defensive stopper. "Here I am thinking I want to play in the NBA, and I can't even get the best of somebody at Santa Clara I'd never heard of," says Nash. "But I finally figured it out."

Nash just worked and worked, and got better and better. He and his buddies would sit around at night talking sports, music and women--he acknowledges that he was not a dedicated student and worked "just hard enough" to earn a degree in sociology--and SportsCenter would come on. That was the signal for Nash to get off his butt. "I felt uncomfortable being comfortable," he says. "I'd call the manager, get the key to the gym, call some teammates and go shoot for a couple of hours." Nash led the Broncos to three NCAA tournament appearances and was the WCC's player of the year as a junior and a senior.

In the summers, Nash played for Team Canada, first for the junior squad and then for the national team, and it was during the World Games in Toronto in 1994 that he had another Pasquale-like moment. Before taking over as Los Angeles Lakers coach, Del Harris, then serving as an adviser to the Canadian team, was smitten with Nash's see-the-whole-floor game. "I remember it like it was yesterday," says Harris. "I approached him and said, 'Steve, you may not know it, but you're an NBA player. You have a shot at having a good career. You remind me so much of a guy who nobody said could play named Mike Dunleavy.'"

Nash remembers too. "So many people said, 'Give me a break' when I told them I wanted to be an NBA player," he says, "so when you hear someone from the NBA say it, it means a lot. When you're on the borderline, when you don't have what everybody thinks you need to make it, it's important to have someone who believes in you. It's sometimes the most important thing."

What Harris saw in Nash was the kind of court sense that allowed Dunleavy, now the Los Angeles Clippers' coach, to carve out a solid 11-year career. That's what the Suns saw before they made Nash the 15th pick of the '96 draft, primarily to back up All-Star Kevin Johnson. Phoenix fans, however, saw something else entirely: a small Canadian. They booed the Nash pick when it was announced at the Suns' arena. During Nash's rookie season, in which he averaged 10.5 minutes per game, Phoenix traded for Jason Kidd, and that seemed to spell doom for the Canadian Kid. "I figured I was the odd man out," says Nash.

But Johnson, one of the Suns' alltime greats, had given the rookie another Pasquale-Harris-like boost when he said, "You're as good as anyone I play against." The moment remains frozen in Nash's memory. "It stopped me cold," he says, "because until then maybe I didn't believe in my dream myself." He got another jolt of encouragement the following season, when Danny Ainge replaced Cotton Fitzsimmons as coach. Having been a freewheeling guard himself, Ainge liked small ball and liked shooters. He frequently deployed a three-guard offense, Nash usually being the one to come off picks and shoot. "To this day," Nash says, "one of my biggest accomplishments was getting minutes my second year." (He got 21.9 per game and averaged 9.1 points.)

Eventually, though, the Suns' brass didn't envision Nash's supplanting Kidd and traded him to Dallas after the 1997-98 season. Over the next six years Nash developed into the perfect point guard for the Mavericks--a team that was offensive-minded, entertaining and, once Nash and Dirk Nowitzki got their pick-and-roll game down, pretty good. But all the flash and dash couldn't turn defense-deficient Dallas into a bona fide contender, and when Nash became a free agent in the summer of '04, owner Mark Cuban decided his point guard was expendable.

Meanwhile, the Suns were intent on remaking themselves along the lines of the Showtime Lakers and felt that Nash was just the point guard they needed..

The move was big news around the NBA--but not big, big news. At the time, Nash was perceived by his peers as a curiosity as much as an All-Star point guard.

•Shooting

If a lead guard is deadly from the outside, opponents have to play up on him, and that increases his opportunities for what the Suns call "blow-bys." There are nights when Arenas, Iverson and Davis are unstoppable, but opponents can always play off them and make them hit a few outside shots. Nash, like the Detroit Pistons' playmaker, Chauncey Billups, must always be crowded. The Phoenix assistants joke that they want to rebound for Nash when he works on his jumper before and after practice. "You just stand under the basket, and it comes right to you," says Alvin Gentry.

•Drive and determination

That's Nash and always has been Nash. He concedes that last season he wanted to show the Mavs--whom he torched for a career-high 48 points in Game 4 of the conference semifinals--that they'd made a mistake in not re-signing him. Now he's playing to win a championship.

•Court sense

In this regard Nash is as good as anyone since Utah Jazz star John Stockton. "Certain players are predisposed to creativity and decision making, and I guess I'm one of them," Nash says. "I do believe that, to an extent, point guards are born, not made. But you have to make yourself better. You have to take those natural gifts and expand them. You hear about so-called tweeners, guys who aren't quite point guards and aren't quite shooting guards. What do they usually become?"

Mediocre shooting guards?

"Exactly," says Nash.

•Leadership

It's not absolutely necessary that coach and quarterback be on the same page, but it helps. Nash and Mike D'Antoni aren't just on the same page--they're in the same sentence. D'Antoni is convinced that Nash is always trying to do the right thing for the team, and it goes without saying that Nash buys into D'Antoni's go-go-go philosophy on the break and his dribble-dribble-probe philosophy in the half-court. "There are times when Steve dribbles too much," says D'Antoni, "and times that he tries stuff that is too outlandish. But why would I say anything to him? Nine times out of 10 he makes it work."

•Athleticism

Physically gifted point guards go around (the speedy Iverson), through (the powerful Billups) or over (the spring-loaded Davis) their opponents. It's obvious that Nash isn't that powerful or blessed with much lift. But here's news: He's not all that quick, either--not from a standing start, anyway. Nash and his teammates and coaches shake their heads when they hear testimonies to his quickness, for within his own team Bell, House, Stoudemire and All-Star forward Shawn Marion are all quicker, never mind backup guard Leandro Barbosa, who's twice as quick. Yes, the Suns are one of the league's quickest teams, yet Nash feels he can be outquicked by most of his opponents.

But not outjuked. "I'm more elusive than quick, and people confuse the two," says Nash. "I'm really good on the move, which involves coordination, timing and balance. Once I get going, I can do a lot of things. But I'm painfully bad at explosiveness." What Nash has done, then, is to master ways to be always moving. The Suns' offense is predicated on that principle, even in the half-court. Nash gives it up on the run and gets it back (by a pass or a dribble handoff) on the run. But what else would you expect?

"We all just feel, I don't know, safer when Steve's out there," Mike D'Antoni says. And Nash knows that the responsibility to keep things safe stops with him. He's an MVP, so that's where it should stop. He can handle it. The pieces have fallen into place better than he could have imagined when he hatched his NBA dream back in Canada. He is the elite leader of an elite team that could challenge for the championship if, as expected, Stoudemire comes back after the All-Star break.

All those mornings when he shot free throws in the rain or all those nights when he asked the Santa Clara team manager to open up the gym. "Most guys somewhere along the line will meet an obstacle they aren't willing to clear," he says, "whether it's shooting or dribbling or something off the court, like girls or partying. They will not keep on going. I kept on going."

The Steve drive. That's really how the Canadian Kid became America's Point Guard.

HOUSTON ROCKETS D-LEAGUE - LAUNCHING 3'S

The future of the NBA lies in Texas. Not in Dallas, Houston or San Antonio, home to the state's three NBA teams who have won a combined 64.4 percent of their games over the last decade, but farther south to Hidalgo, Texas, located a long 3-pointer across the Rio Grande from Mexico. There, in the NBA's D-League, the Rio Grande Valley Vipers are playing the most extreme professional basketball in America.

You might have seen the Vipers' shot chart, which went viral on Twitter after being posted by the D-League.

Nearly half of Rio Grande Valley's shot attempts have come from beyond the 3-point line, but that's not the only thing that sets the team apart statistically. The Vipers are averaging 107.2 possessions per 48 minutes, which not only blows away the fastest mark in the NBA this season (97.5) but is faster than any NBA team has played in the last 20 years.

Since Rio Grande Valley's offense is also hyper-efficient (their rate of 121.0 points per 100 possessions would lead the NBA this season and blow past the 2004-05 Phoenix Suns (117.5) for the best offensive rating since the NBA-ABA merger), the team is averaging a nearly unthinkable 129.4 points per game. Three players score at least 20 points per game, and all five starters are averaging at least 17.1 points.

None of this is happening by accident. Since the Houston Rockets took control of the Vipers' basketball operations under a single-affiliate partnership agreement in 2009, the Rockets front office under GM Daryl Morey has utilized the D-League squad as a laboratory of sorts, a testing ground for ideas they can import to the NBA.

Under Houston management, the Vipers have always relied heavily on the 3-pointer. They also quickly pushed the pace, and have continued to play faster each season (the D-League's average pace is generally trending upwards, but Rio Grande Valley has increased more). While the big club has always tended to play fast and shoot a lot of 3-pointers, it wasn't until last season that the Rockets really mirrored their affiliate's extreme tendencies. It took some time for Houston to get the right personnel in place (this year's team has inevitably slowed down relative to the rest of the league to accommodate Dwight Howard) and get total buy-in from the coaching staff.

As a result, it's fascinating to consider whether this year's Vipers might be a preview of things to come for the Rockets. After hiring Nevada Smith from Division III Keystone College, Rio Grande Valley has taken the twin philosophies of playing fast and emphasizing high-value shots to their logical extremes. According to the new NBA.com/DLeague/Stats, the Vipers took just 36 2-point shots outside the paint during their first eight games. Some 88.1 percent of their shot attempts came either at the rim or behind the 3-point line. That blows away Houston, which leads the NBA by taking 69.5 percent of its shots from those two locations; no other NBA team is above 60 percent.

This leads to an inevitable question: How far can teams increase the number of 3-pointers they shoot? Last year's Knicks set a new league record by taking 35.4 percent of their shots beyond the arc. The Rockets attempted them at the third-highest rate ever, and are on track to shoot them slightly more frequently this season. League-wide, NBA teams are taking 3s on more than a quarter of their shot attempts (25.4 percent) for the first time ever.

Seeing how much further NBA teams can go may require nothing more than looking at the NCAA, where the shorter 3-point line has always been more inviting. In fact, college teams shot 3-pointers as frequently as NBA teams do now all the way back in 1992-93. Long-distance attempts peaked at 34.4 percent of all shots by 2007-08 before the NCAA moved the line back from 19 feet, nine inches to 20 feet, nine inches -- still three feet shorter than the NBA line at its longest. Since then, the NCAA 3-point rate has settled in around 33 percent of all shots taken.

The superiority of the 3-point shot has long been held by statistical analysts, but the trend toward fast-paced play is a new one. With former Houston assistant GM Sam Hinkie taking over the Philadelphia 76ers this season, the Sixers have supplanted the Rockets as the league's fastest team.

While there are a variety of reasons Philadelphia might want to speed things up during a rebuilding season, as Per Diem partner Tom Haberstroh explored in the first installment of "The Big Number," that both the Rockets, 76ers and the Vipers are playing at fast paces seems to indicate Morey and Hinkie fundamentally believe in it. (The 76ers' D-League team, the Delaware 87s, also is playing at a fast pace and ranks second in the league in 3-point attempt percentage.)

That philosophy has been applied in the NBA before, most notably by Paul Westhead's Denver Nuggets. The difference is that the Rio Grande Valley system has proven more than just a gimmick. The Vipers won their second D-League championship in four years last spring and have started this season 9-0. Thursday's win over the Austin Toros was their 19th consecutive during the regular season (not counting a 6-0 playoff run), tying the D-League record.

The Rockets' style won't be nearly so extreme when they face the Golden State Warriors tonight (10:30 p.m. ET on ESPN). If Rio Grande Valley continues to be so successful, however, expect Houston to continue pushing the pace and hoisting more 3-pointers. And if that works for the Rockets and Sixers, more NBA teams will follow the Vipers' lead.

DIANA NYAD - CUBA TO FLORIDA

Diana Nyad used just one word - "euphoric" - to describe how she felt upon reaching the shores of Key West at the end of a 112-mile, record-breaking swim.

But it was three words that Nyad, 64, relied on over the past year, she revealed to conquer a feat - swimming from Cuba to Florida without a shark tank - that had previously eluded any other human being and Nyad herself in her four previous attempts.

"I decided this year to use a mantra … and the phrase I decided to use was 'Find a way.'"

"If something is important to you and it looks impossible and you're up against it, just step back for a minute and say, 'Really? Do I have the resolve to think of everything to the nth degree to get through this?' and most times we do," she said. "People give up too quickly."

Nyad never gave up in this, her fifth attempt, at the swim, even when her face and body were lacerated from the saltwater and the custom-made mask she wore to protect herself from box jellyfish, a stinging jellyfish that had caused her to stop her last attempt because of burns left on her limbs and face.

In the final homestretch, Nyad, a Los Angeles native who made her first try at the record in 1978 at age 28, said she and her 35-member crew could see the lights of Key West ahead, which focused her mind and changed her thinking.

"I had 15 hours to think. Fifteen hours to stroke and think about this journey," Nyad said. "You know, so many people discuss the journey and the destination. Well, the destination was always my vision of the palm trees and the shore, but the journey, I didn't make it, for the last few years and that journey was thrilling. It really was. The discovery, the people, the looking inside of what you're made of but to finally get to the destination?"

"I tell you, I was euphoric yesterday," she said.

A competitive swimmer from early on, Nyad began striving for the Olympics as a young girl but was sidelined at 17 with endocarditis, a virus in her heart. She overcame that ailment and swam the 28 miles around the island of Manhattan in just under eight hours in 1975 and, four years later, swam the 102 miles from North Bimini, Bahamas, to Juno Beach, Fla., in 27.5 hours.

Nyad said she may have been a more physically capable swimmer in those days, in her youth, but that there was a reason she accomplished her goal of swimming from Cuba to Florida this year, at the age of 64.

"How many athletes do you know, John McEnroe is one for sure, who say that they wish they could have played at the world class level in their 50s and their 60s because the power of concentration and their perspective of what it all means and what you're capable of are infinitely higher at this age than when you're a young 20-something?" she said. "I really do believe that endurance grows and, also, we can never discount, in any sport, the mental aspect."

When Nyad walked up onto Smathers Beach in Key West Monday afternoon surrounded by her supporters to chants of "Nyad, Nyad, Nyad," she, through her fatigue, told the crowd to "Never, ever give up."

Nyad's message quickly became the headline of her record-breaking swim, an occurrence she said happened because her feat wasn't really about the swimming at all.

"I didn't have much energy to talk for too long, but he first thing I said, I looked around, because those people weren't from the world of swimming," she said. "They don't care about the world record. It wasn't an athletic event. It was a moment of human spirit."

TAR HEELS COMPETITIVE CULTURE LEADS TO SUCCESS

On the same December evening last year when the University of North Carolina women's soccer team won a national championship, undergraduate assistant coach Brittani Bartok posted a picture on the somewhat unofficial and entirely entertaining team Twitter feed for which she is maestro. The top panel of what were two photographs stacked together showed a scene of Tar Heels strewn around a practice field in various stages of exhaustion. The bottom panel showed players sprawled amidst celebratory confetti at the conclusion of the championship game against Penn State.

There for all to see, and retweeted more than a thousand times, was cause and effect. Separating beginning and end is trickier.  One championship pursuit ends, another begins. And where one begins, another ends. On and on forever it seems.

So here we are.

"Is this going to be painful?" Tar Heels women's soccer coach Anson Dorrance asked the players assembled in front of him. It was a rhetorical question, but he supplied an answer anyway.
"Absolutely."

From a vantage point along one of the white lines that marked the edge of the practice field, even the cicadas were at intervals drowned out by a wave of labored breathing that approached and receded as more than 30 bodies sprinted from one end to the other and jogged back again. There were no soccer balls in sight. The only opponent was the clock, 18 seconds to cover 120 yards. Another 30 seconds to complete the jog back to the starting point. Rest for 30 seconds and then do it again. And again. And a few more times after that.

Kealia Ohai, the All-American forward who not only scored the goal that put North Carolina in the championship game a season ago but came up with the strike that propelled the United States to gold in the Under-20 World Cup earlier the same year, finished the final sprint at the front of the pack. Once across the line, she squatted on the balls of her feet, sank to all fours and then lay on the ground while a trainer elevated her legs. All around her players crouched, sat or stood doubled over in various stages of misery.

Play the game at a sprint. It's one of the coach's favorite adages. It doesn't happen easily.

"From the beginning, what I've always tried to do is think about the kind of team that I would hate to play against if I were a player," Dorrance said. "I would hate to play against my team. I would hate it. I would love to play against some of these other teams that give you pockets of areas to play-make and stage and slow the game down. ...

"But who would I hate to play against? Someone coming at me for 90 minutes."

It is as good an explanation as any as to why North Carolina so often celebrates amidst confetti in December. As for how it works, that is what August is about. This is where the team prepares for those 90 minutes. For part of preseason, first in Chapel Hill and then at the team's training retreat in Ocean Isle Beach, N.C.

The reign of Anson Dorrance

August is Dorrance's favorite time of year. Just ask him.

"I get so excited, I can't sleep," Dorrance said. It was a Saturday and a day off for the players, but he was in his office all the same.

Or ask the person who has to put up with him.

"He gets so excited, he can't sleep," said M'Liss Dorrance a day later as she and her husband ate hamburgers amidst tables full of his players, a not-so-quiet, not-so-intimate meal before coach and team departed Chapel Hill for a week of training on the North Carolina coast. As he responded at length to a question about the relative merits of the 4-2-3-1 and 3-4-3 formations, she wandered off to chat with players.

Asked if he'll know it's time to do something else when the preseason insomnia ceases, the 62-year-old coach looked quizzical, as if someone had asked him what he would do when he grows tired of oxygen.

At least opposing coaches can take solace in knowing they aren't the only ones who lose sleep over the Tar Heels.

North Carolina has won 21 of the 31 NCAA championships awarded in women's soccer, in addition to an AIAW title before that, all under Dorrance. The NCAA titles are more than the combined totals of Connecticut and Tennessee in women's basketball, more than the combined totals of Arizona and UCLA in softball. Excluding intrinsically individual sports that award team titles like wrestling and track and field, no men's or women's Division I program is in possession of more national titles.

North Carolina has more NCAA championships than Manchester United has league titles in England.

The résumé reads like an empire. Even in a sport like women's soccer that falls well short of football or men's basketball in the athletic department hierarchy, it might be reasonable to expect any such program to have adopted some of the vanities of royalty over the years. As if in answer, four white vans sat outside the burger joint near campus. Assistant coaches Bill Palladino and Chris Ducar and director of operations Tom Sander had the keys to three of them (entering his 18th season with the team, Ducar is the junior member of the trio). Dorrance had the fourth set of keys. The sport's version of John Wooden, Bear Bryant or Pat Summitt still drives his players around, like thousands of high school and youth league coaches throughout the country.

That isn't true for just this trip. Vans are the team's main method of transportation. On the road trips that require flights, the Tar Heels rent vans at the other end. Some of it is idiosyncratic. The vans offer more flexibility than charter buses, more control that the man in charge need not cede. Most of it, though, is simply practical. After all these years it's what makes the budget work.

For all but one of the past 10 years, the vans headed to Ocean Isle Beach, a town about three hours southeast of Chapel Hill and not far from the South Carolina border. After a preseason trip to England in advance of the 2003 season, the Tar Heels rolled to a 27-0-0 record and their 17th NCAA championship. Coaches and players liked the time together away from campus before the season. Instead of scattering after practice, the players spent time together. This year together means 36 of them in one house, along with Bartok, fellow undergraduate assistant Indi Cowie and athletic trainer Nicole Fava.

"We can't get away from each other if we tried, really, unless you wanted to swim pretty far out in the ocean," Bartok said. "There's 37-or-something girls in pretty much the same house, so we're kind of forced to spend a lot of time with each other. And we enjoy it. We're not jumping into the ocean to get away from each other."

No 'I' in this team

Two traits define North Carolina. The words ring hollow until you look again at the trophy case.

No players compete harder against each other. None play harder for each other. The time in Ocean Isle Beach reveals how they have come to coexist.

It was the week's first practice on a ragged high school field several miles from the ocean house, and senior Kelly McFarlane exuded something less than beach mellowness. Coaches had split the roster into four teams for a seven-on-seven possession drill, two games going on simultaneously in a round-robin format until the teams with the best record met in what was dubbed the "gold-medal" game. That the winning side didn't actually receive anything, other than the satisfaction of victory, didn't seem to matter to anyone. It certainly didn't matter to McFarlane.

Even as play continued around her in one game, McFarlane argued with Dorrance over his application of one of the drill's rules that cost her team the ball. When the time came for the top two teams in round-robin play to meet in the final, McFarlane's team was initially dispatched to the consolation game. A couple players started to walk toward that part of the field, but McFarlane made a beeline for Sander, North Carolina's keeper of the stats, to protest. There had to be a mistake. Her team should be in the final. The decision was reversed. McFarlane's team then won the final game.

Glory was fleeting. After a water break, a new drill began.

Maybe nobody likes a sore loser, but they turn a blind eye to sore winners here.

"A lot of what we do, because they're keeping score and because they're recording everything, it kind of brings that competitiveness out of people," McFarlane said. "I think I always have been competitive, but I think in this environment, it definitely kind of fosters that."

A health and human policy major who plans to go to medical school, McFarlane is downright genial away from the field, an agreeable, affable Californian who at one point sheepishly details the nutritionist-influenced grocery list she and the other seniors filled for the house at the expense of the junk food they wanted to buy. On the field, not so much.

Dorrance once tried to recruit McFarlane's mother to play soccer in college. She ran cross country for the Tar Heels instead. But years later, she sent her soccer-playing daughter across the country to the soccer camps the Tar Heels run in Chapel Hill. McFarlane wasn't a star recruit in those camps or part of any youth national team pools. She didn't really believe she was good enough to play at North Carolina. The coach concurred on first inspection. She was too slow, ungainly, not enough of an athlete to be of much recruiting interest. Except she played so damn hard.

She played at least 1,000 minutes in each of her first three seasons for the Tar Heels and seems ticketed for a starting role this season. She turned out to be such a quintessentially North Carolina player that Dorrance went out and got another McFarlane for this year's freshman class, Kelly's younger sister, Darcy.

North Carolina wouldn't be what it is without current and future national team talents like Crystal Dunn, Summer Green and Ohai. The list of current and former national team veterans in the soccer office goes on and on like the list of all-conference honorees at most schools. The program also wouldn't be what it is without players like McFarlane who may not play a minute beyond college.

Perhaps surprisingly for a program that doesn't have down years, only years in which it didn't win the championship, quite a bit has changed about the way North Carolina trains. Led by former assistant coach Cindy Parlow Cone, now the coach of NWSL's Portland Thorns FC, the Tar Heels last season overhauled their training philosophy to align with that of Dutch coach Raymond Verheijen. It's a name you hear a lot talking to Dorrance. Even the players, few of whom are avid soccer watchers and wouldn't know Marco van Basten from Johan Cruyff, comfortably drop his name. In grossly oversimplified terms, Verheijen dissents from what he feels is a culture of overtraining in soccer. His model suggests it is better to do more with less, utilizing short intervals of intense training.

To the consternation of some soccer alumni, and even the seniors who lobbied throughout this particular week for more practice and more running, preseason is not as brutal as it once was.

What will never change is that culture of competition. Practices are intense. Elbows and expletives fly, forearms lodge against lower backs, and players go into tackles with gusto. At one point Dorrance reminded the players before a drill began, "We are not injuring each other; we are teammates."

Battered bodies are one product of the intensity. No more than 10 minutes after the coach's warning, highly touted freshman Emily Bruder went down with an injury, although one she appeared to suffer without contact from a teammate. She sat out subsequent practices and a scrimmage against Wofford. Bruised egos would seem a more common concern, but either the players hide those wounds well or what happens on the field really does stay there. Within an hour of slamming into each other on the practice field and listening to McFarlane, Ohai and others gripe about every point in drills, the same players took to the beach together with an inflatable killer whale and other ocean-going flotation devices.

"Sometimes it's tricky," McFarlane said. "Sometimes people may be pissed about something a little bit after practice. But it's just the way our culture is set up. Everybody is going hard to make each other better. At the end of the day, we want our practices to be hard, and we want to put pressure on each other in practice so we're ready for games. Everybody respects that."

That the entire system is set up as a meritocracy, brutal and unforgiving though it may be, must play some role. Perhaps it is harder to nurse a grudge when you know you ultimately control your own fate. Every player is on equal footing just before she gets knocked on her rear end.

Dorrance describes his lineup as forever fluid. That's a kind way to describe it, as the back line learned this preseason. Over the course of a few days, defenders Satara Murray and Hanna Gardner both drew less than rave reviews from their coach. Shortly before leaving for the beach he suggested Gardner, a walk-on who was a breakout performer in the postseason a year ago and subsequently earned time in the under-20 national team player pool, was competing for her job against "any defender who looks good when Hanna Gardner screws up."

Murray, a starter in each of her first two seasons and the Most Outstanding Defensive Player in the College Cup, so infuriated Dorrance with a lackluster practice later in the week that he pondered dropping her from the starting lineup on the eve of the scrimmage against Wofford just to send a message.

Katie Bowen, an immensely talented sophomore defender and midfielder who went to the 2012 Olympics with New Zealand's senior national team, did lose a place with the first unit, at least temporarily.

Let coaches draft from the entire college soccer player pool and they wouldn't get through too many lineups before all three of those players heard their names called. But here they aren't immune. No one is.

Just about the only veteran defender who escaped rebuke was junior Caitlin Ball, a walk-on from Chapel Hill who was so under the radar that Dorrance once told her not to bother coming out for the team.

Palladino, the architect of the defense and one of the most trusted and influential assistants in the college game, went to see Ball play in high school and came away underwhelmed. Dorrance went to a different game, but left with a similar takeaway. Ball recalled a phone conversation that followed in which Dorrance told her it probably wasn't worth her time to try to walk on. The news was disappointing but not exactly earth-shattering. She hadn't really planned on playing college soccer and was going to North Carolina anyway. But she had already signed up to play for a club team the summer after high school graduation and her mom wouldn't let her back out of her first practice after the conversation with Dorrance.

By the end of that summer, her club team won a major tournament and her coach begged Dorrance and Palladino to take another look at the local kid. A week before the preseason, she went to Dorrance's house for an interview. He asked her if she was a psycho. She said she wasn't. He invited her to walk on. By the end of September she was a starter. But for injury, she has been ever since.

She earned her security, even if doing so meant coaches admitting their own recruiting miscalculation.

These were the lessons all 12 of the freshmen were expected to learn as the preseason progressed.

Like several classmates, newcomer Joanna Boyles is a fixture in the youth national system. She played for the United States in last year's Under-17 World Cup in Azerbaijan. She graduated from high school early and won't turn 18 until November, so she could conceivably play in the next two Under-20 World Cups. She is technically skilled beyond her years and scored plenty of goals in club soccer. That isn't what will get her on the field in Chapel Hill this season. Another of Dorrance's favorite sayings is that if you can defend, you will play. If you can defend for five minutes, you will play five minutes.

Through the first few days of preseason, Dorrance said he wasn't sure Boyles would see the field as a freshman. It was hard to tell if he was exaggerating.

By the time the scrimmage against Wofford rolled around midway through beach week, Boyles played more minutes than anyone on the roster. She threw her body into challenges -- too willingly at one point, drawing a rebuke from Dorrance for a reckless slide tackle. She didn't back down from a few post-whistle wrestling matches when her arms and legs got entangled with an opponent. It was still something closer to raw defensive energy than polished defensive awareness, but it would do.

She'll play, if she keeps it up. Perhaps a lot. A week before classes started, she had passed her first test.

"Honestly it doesn't matter, it does not matter how great you are technically or goal-scoring-wise, you have to lay your body on the line," Boyles said. "And if you don't, you won't play. And I think it's all about finding that within yourself and you have to kind of dig that out of you. It's something inside of you that you have to find in order to play.

"I think the past couple of days, I think I've really found that. I'm excited about it."

The winning standard

Alabama football. Connecticut women's basketball. Kentucky men's basketball. A lot of programs face championship expectations every season. Only at North Carolina does the historical record suggest it's not an unreasonable standard, even as the list of championship programs doubled since 2000. No longer can the Tar Heels realistically win every year, but all that history makes it feel like they should.

"You have to understand the expectations here -- it sometimes feels, especially on us, there's a lot of pressure," Bartok said. "It's like if you don't win, you're a failure.

"We feel that. As much as Anson doesn't want us to feel that, it's inevitable."

Playing for the Tar Heels requires thick skin. And perhaps the ability to stretch a metaphor to its breaking point.

One evening on the deck of the beach house, Gardner and freshman Sarah Ashley Firstenberg stood opposite each other and took turns slapping each other in the face. The sound of a hand connecting with cheek elicited either approving cheers or critical jeers from teammates, at least those not doubled over in laughter. It wasn't a simmering feud from the field that boiled over. Gardner and Firstenberg grinned and egged each other on. It wasn't a fight -- it was a contest.

Everything was a contest in Ocean Isle. Tanning became a contest. Board games and puzzles became contests far more heated than the designers probably ever intended.

College students find curious ways to amuse themselves. Competitive college students in a confined space for an extended period all the more.

"I think even our games we play off the field are super competitive," Dunn said of the slap spectacle. "I think that's what drives our program, but we do it in a friendly way. We're not killing each other. We're just bringing that competitive atmosphere in everything. I think it's important, not just on the field."

There are surely times when it isn't fun, when the competitiveness gets to be a bit much or when a morning arrives when you just don't feel like being graded on every minor technical detail against 30-plus other people. Or when you would like to play more than 10 minutes a game. And if it was only about soccer, only about winning drills, winning games -- winning everything -- it might all fall apart.

If that were all it was about, there wouldn't have been a van full of players singing the Celine Dion song from "Titanic" as they waited for one of the other vans to arrive at a destination.

They wouldn't like each other as much as they clearly do if soccer were all there was. Dorrance could get them to compete against each other. Only they can choose to play for each other.

When Bartok was being recruited, people at other schools gave her as many reasons why she shouldn't choose North Carolina as why she should choose their school. It was a military atmosphere. She wouldn't play. She wouldn't have any fun. They recruited people so they wouldn't have to play against them. It was part of the reason she took it upon herself to start the behind-the-scenes Twitter feed when she was a sophomore in Chapel Hill (there is also now an official feed for the more mundane matters). What people saw of the Tar Heels on the field was part of the program's identity but not all of it. She wanted people to understand why when she went home for the holidays and listened to friends who played for other schools gripe about who had it worst with coaches, teammates or some other irritant, she sat in awkward silence. She wasn't a star. She didn't start. She just didn't have any complaints.

"The culture of the team is everyone is here because they love the game, they love to play," sophomore Caroline Lindquist said. "But once you get to know every individual, everyone has their story. I would never say anyone on this team is a soccer robot. There are definitely people who love the game, but I think that makes them more interesting than mechanical."

Late in the week, Dorrance came back of his own volition to the subject of when he might call it quits. Give him enough of a stake to put him in the game -- give him a couple of players like Dunn, Green and Ohai are and Boyles, Bruder and Amber Munerlyn could be -- and he'll keep doing it. The culture of competition will find the rest. It is what he waits to see each summer.

"There are moments that define you," Dorrance said. "We're all looking for those moments in the preseason. Ideally, you're also looking for those moments in the recruiting process, but there's no game that we can see at younger levels that can replicate one of my practices. My practices are the cauldron where we've got to sort out what this alloy is going to become.

"It's tremendous. That's why I can't sleep right now because I am so excited about every single practice."

Everything begins again in August. Same as it always was.

JIM SHAW ON RECRUITING

“Recruiting has a certain art form to it. I think you have to in my opinion recruit guys that you can win with that you have a chance to get. If you recruit guys you can’t win with, then that doesn’t make any sense. And if you recruit guys that you have no chance of getting, then that doesn’t make any sense. So if you answer the question, ‘OK, Percy Allen. Can we win with Percy Allen? Yes. Do we have a chance to get him? Yes. Then you only have to answer one more question and that’s is he going to screw up our program? If the answer to that is no, then you’re off in running. 

I believe in simplifying it. If you simplify things, then you’re able to target more accurately and the process works a lot easier. If you recruit guys you can’t win with or guys you can’t get, then you end up wasting too much time. Or if you recruit guys that screw up the program, you end up wasting too much time.”