March 31, 2006

Chapel Hill - University of North Carolina men's basketball coach Roy Williams is the 2006 Associated Press Coach of the Year, the AP announced at a ceremony in Indianapolis this morning.

Williams, who won the AP award while coaching at the University of Kansas in 1992, is the second coach to win the award at two schools. Eddie Sutton was the AP Coach of the Year in 1978 at Arkansas and 1986 at Kentucky.

Williams has also received National Coach of the Year honors this year from the Commonwealth Club of Kentucky (Rupp Award) and the United States Basketball Writers Association of America.

The Tar Heels went 23-8, despite being the first team in Atlantic Coast Conference history to lose its top seven scorers from the previous season. Carolina started two freshmen and two former walk-ons for most of the season, one year after Williams led UNC to the NCAA championship.

Carolina went 12-4 and finished alone in second place in the ACC. That included a 7-1 record in ACC road games, capped by a 83-76 win at No. 1 ranked Duke in the regular-season finale. The Tar Heels also won at 10th-ranked Kentucky.

Williams is the seventh coach to win the AP honor more than once since the national wire service began presenting the award in 1967. The other multiple winners include UCLA's John Wooden (five times), Indiana's Bob Knight (three times), Sutton, DePaul's Ray Meyer, Oregon State's Ralph Miller and Houston's Guy Lewis.

Williams, who has a 493-124 record, has the fourth-highest winning percentage in history at 79.9 percent. Only Clair Bee, Adolph Rupp and John Wooden have a higher percentage.

This is the sixth year in Williams' 18 seasons as a collegiate head coach in which he has won a national honor. He won the USBWA award in 1990, the Los Angeles Times award in 1991, the AP award in 1992, the Naismith and Sporting News awards in 1997 and the New York Athletic Club award in 2005.