From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Dean Edwards Smith (born February 28, 1931) American former head coach of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Tar Heels men's basketball team from 1961 to 1997.

Born in Emporia, Kansas, the legendary Smith was consistently regarded as one of the leading coaches in the country, and still holds the record for the most victories by an NCAA Division I men's head coach, with 879. (He was surpassed on March 22, 2005 by Pat Summitt, women's basketball coach for the University of Tennessee.) The basketball arena at UNC is officially the Dean E. Smith Student Activities Center, popularly known as the Dean Dome. In 1997, he was named Sports Illustrated magazine's "Sportsman of the Year." He was enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame on May 2, 1983.

A four-time national Coach of the Year, Smith's basketball bloodlines run deep. He grew up in Kansas and played on the Topeka High School basketball team and later he played on the University of Kansas Jayhawks NCAA championship team in 1952 with Basketball Hall of Fame member Clyde Lovellette and under the legendary coach Forrest "Phog" Allen, who in turn learned the game from its inventor, James Naismith. It was at Kansas where Smith observed the finer points of the game from 1949-1953. After earning his undergraduate degree from Kansas, Dean served as a graduate assistant coach at Kansas from 1953-1954.

His teams went to the Final Four 11 times, winning the NCAA Championship twice. His first championship came in '82, with a lineup featuring All-American forwards James Worthy and Sam Perkins, plus a young freshman by the name of Michael Jordan. One signal characteristic of his career was its consistency, with his teams winning at least 20 games a year for 27 years in a row. All his great coaching achievements occurred after beginning with a losing season and being burned in effigy at Chapel Hill in 1961.

Smith also played a large part in desegregating the city of Chapel Hill when he integrated the Tar Heels basketball team by recruiting Charlie Scott as the university's first African-American scholarship athlete.

He also coached the United States team to a gold medal at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, Canada.

He has been credited with introducing numerious innovations, including:

Of course, there is no systematic mechanism for maintaining credit for innovations such as these, so it is likely that some of these may eventually be found to belong to someone else. But the fact that so many are associated to him speaks to his ability to find new ideas that would work. All of these are widespread in basketball today.

One strategy he made infamous was the four corners offense, a strategy for stalling with a lead near the end of the game. The introduction of a shot clock in 1985, which he supported, made that offense mostly obsolete. Although fellow Kansas alum John McClendon invented the four corners, Smith is better known for utilizing it in games.

Current UNC coach Roy Williams, whose 2005 team won the NCAA champoinship, was once an assistant under Smith.