Allen Fieldhouse was quiet at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, as it normally is in mid-April.
A basketball team manager deposited some equipment in a closet and prepared to turn out the lights on James Naismith Court, which had been used sporadically by women’s and men’s players throughout the day.
Today, the fieldhouse could remain calm — or it could explode in wild activity if KU coach Roy Williams decides to take the head basketball-coaching job at North Carolina.
As of Sunday night, with Williams returning to Lawrence from the Wooden Award banquet in Los Angeles, folks in Carolina and Kansas were not quite sure of the coach’s plans.
“I don’t know. I really don’t. My wife and I were just discussing it, and we don’t know what he’s going to do,” Buddy Baldwin, Williams’ high school coach, said Sunday night from his home in Asheville, N.C.
“I don’t think anybody except Roy knows what he’s gonna do.”
Baldwin talked with his former T.C. Roberson High pupil “for about 10 minutes on Tuesday,” discussing KU’s narrow national championship-game loss to Syracuse.
“I just told him whatever he does, I’m behind him 100 percent,” Baldwin said. “The last time he talked about leaving, when it came up (in summer of 2000), I felt he made the right move (staying at KU). It’s his program at Kansas. He has a great program. I’m a Carolina grad, too, as he is. I know he loves Carolina.
“He has a great program where he’s at. It’s obvious when you go to ball games and the playoffs, how the people think so highly of him. But he grew up here. His family is from the area. There are a lot of pros one way and the other way. I just don’t know.”
Neither do the Jayhawks nor their parents.
“I’m just as nervous as everybody else, doing the same thing as everybody else — praying,” said Sharon Graves, mother of KU junior Jeff Graves. “I think it would be a hard decision. You try to put yourself in that person’s place. You have to take care of home. If he’s not happy, that will not help the kids. If he is happy, the kids are sure happy he’s their coach.
“Sure,” she laughed, asked if she wanted Williams to stay. “He’s one of the main reasons Jeff chose Kansas.”
Graves liked the job Williams did with her son this year.
“It was tough for both of them. I’m sure both are better for it,” Sharon Graves said. “Jeff likes him, respects him. With respect comes friendship.”
It has been a wild year for Jeff Graves and his family. He reported to camp 40 pounds overweight, was in a serious car accident and suffered a concussion, battled back and proved to be a key contributor for a national title runner-up team.
“It ain’t over yet,” Sharon said from her Lee’s Summit, Mo., home.
Meanwhile, in Leavenworth, the Simien family attended church with their son, KU sophomore Wayne Simien, who made it home for a relaxing Sunday.
“We didn’t even talk about it,” Wayne Simien Sr. said. “So many people are asking Wayne about it, he probably is happy the subject never came up.”
Simien Sr. hopes Williams continues to coach his son two more years.
“Of course, just like everyone else,” he said, “but if he doesn’t, it’s his decision, and we’ve got to support it.”
The Simiens received phone calls from more than one reporter Sunday.
“The New York Times called and asked us the same question: What is coach going to do? We couldn’t tell them anything,” Simien Sr. said.
Williams was expected back from Los Angeles early this morning. He and KU senior Nick Collison had a busy weekend with Wooden Award festivities.
Asked by the Raleigh (N.C.) News Observer if he had an idea which way Williams was leaning, Collison said Saturday: “No, and I don’t think he does. He’s probably got a couple of more days of mulling it over.”
Roy Watch ’03
Flash link: Should Roy Stay?