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Buzz Williams is waiting in the Texas A&M weight room when I arrive at 6:38 a.m. I’m late, although I argue I am right on time. The clock read 6:28 as I pulled my rental car into a parking space.

I’ve broken the first rule, Williams says.

“Be on time?”

“No. Don’t lie.”

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On Thursday, four Aggies show up for an 8 a.m. voluntary workout, 80 percent of the returning players from the 2018-19 roster. “Intense,” A&M big man Josh Nebo says of his new coach. Before he leaves the weight room and after the players finish jumping rope, Williams puts his left arm around guard T.J. Starks. “I’m not trying to be an a-hole, but that was terrible,” the coach says. “We’re going to have to get a lot better.”

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This is Buzz Williams. He does not always trust easily, but when you’re in, you’re in for life. And he has come to Texas A&M with all of his people, determined to once again rebuild a program that has fallen on hard times.

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The next item on his agenda is an 8:30 meeting — bumped to 9 o’clock — with Advent, a company out of Nashville that will be renovating the basketball facility. This building and program is nowhere close to where Williams wants it

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He has two canvases that will hang in his office. One is a collection of tweets from media and fans criticizing his jump from Marquette to Virginia Tech, and the other is a collection of tweets questioning the jump from Tech to Texas A&M.

This post was edited on 6/1/19 at 5:33 pm

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Posted by WestCoastAg

Member since Oct 2012

145063 posts

Posted on 6/1/19 at 5:36 pm to WestCoastAg

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He obviously will lead by example. The nostalgic 10-day vacation was the most time off he’d ever taken. His days have always started early, and his teams practice early, because he’s studied the benefits of that as well. “Nothing else is on your mind,” he says. “You have just woken up. Nothing bad happened to you yet that day.”

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At the Texas Association of Basketball Coaches clinic in San Antonio on Friday, Williams is approached by the girls’ staff at Randall High School, where his wife, Corey, was a star player in the early 1990s. He wants a picture to send to Corey. After he finishes his two sessions at the clinic, people continue to approach him and each time he tells a story of how they’re connected or something about the town where the coach is from. “He loves this,” says Dale Layer, who is a special assistant to Williams at A&M and hired him in 2000 when Layer was the head coach at Colorado State.

But Williams is also scared.

“Everyone keeps saying, ‘Glad you’re home, Buzz,’” he tells his father-in-law on Thursday as he watches his nephew play in the state tennis tournament. “They’re not gonna be saying that when we start getting our arse kicked.”

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Williams is trying to meet daily with a person important to the process at A&M, and similar to a presidency, he believes the first 100 days are critical. Relationships have always mattered most to him — and why he’s successful. His goal in recruiting is to get in front of a player and his mother as soon as possible, and then he wants to simulate coaching that player in front of Mom and see how she reacts. “Hey, man, in a timeout, I’m going to tell you the truth,” Williams tells recruits. “When I go see your mom, I’m gonna tell her the truth no matter if you’re standing there or not.”

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In some ways, Williams operates like a football coach. He has visited and picked the brains of Jon Gruden, Gus Bradley and Chip Kelly, and he likes the football model of the head coach serving as a delegator. Every year he prints out a sheet with every staffer in the program listed, and there are boxes with job responsibilities under each person. He calls these buckets, and that person is the head coach of that particular bucket.

This post was edited on 6/1/19 at 5:43 pm

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Posted by WestCoastAg

Member since Oct 2012

145063 posts

Posted on 6/1/19 at 5:50 pm to WestCoastAg

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Williams’ biggest investment to A&M is his time. He seems to be chasing his own tail in these early days. Last Wednesday, he met with Chancellor John Sharp, which led to an unplanned meeting, which led to another meeting. He returned about four hours later. At 6 a.m. on Friday, he spoke to a group of high school coaches in a ballroom at a San Antonio hotel. He had asked for the “early-bird” time, because the coaches who show up are the ones who haven’t been out partying all night. He was scheduled to talk for one hour, 10 minutes. He went for two hours and 44 minutes. Wolf finally got his attention from the back of the room to cut it off.

Williams went over the allotted time again at his 10:15 to 11:25 a.m. session, and then it was nearly another hour before he was being shuttled into his Chevy Tahoe, which took him to a private plane to fly with Jackson to Blacksburg to retrieve their families.

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Posted by WestCoastAg

Member since Oct 2012

145063 posts

Posted on 6/1/19 at 5:52 pm to WestCoastAg

There's still a lot more in there that I didn't get into about his life and how he got started in coaching. I tried to keep it specifically on what he is trying to do at A&M but this is a must read if you have an athletic sub

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Posted by PhilipMarlowe

Member since Mar 2013

20475 posts

Posted on 6/1/19 at 6:02 pm to WestCoastAg

quote:
Williams puts his left arm around guard T.J. Starks. “I’m not trying to be an a-hole, but that was terrible,” the coach says. “We’re going to have to get a lot better.”

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