UNC’s Dean Smith and Roy Williams are immortalized on Triangle highway
They’ve received just about every honor and accolade college basketball coaches can get. Now UNC’s Dean Smith and Roy Williams have gotten one more: adjoining stretches of highway bearing their names.
Roy Williams Highway will cover four miles of Interstate 40 in Orange County, from the Martin Luther King Jr. exit east to U.S. 15-501. The next three miles of I-40 in Durham County will be known as Dean Smith Highway, between U.S. 15-501 and the exit for N.C. 54.
The state Board of Transportation unanimously approved both designations on Wednesday. Williams, recovering from knee replacement surgery at home, told the board over a video link that he was flattered and happy.
He also joked that he had done a bit more than Smith to earn the honor. While he was an assistant coach at UNC, Williams said he and two friends got permission to cut trees for their wood stove on property where the highway runs today.
“We went in to the land over there and cut the trees down, chopped it up and used it for firewood for five years,” Williams said. “So I did help clear the land.”
The UNC athletics department requested the naming and will provide $4,000 for state road signs. In separate applications to the N.C. Department of Transportation, UNC athletics director Bubba Cunningham listed the championships and numerous other achievements of each coach over a combined 54 years leading the UNC men’s basketball program.
But Cunningham also included accomplishments off the court. Williams and his family have donated more than $5 million to scholarship programs at UNC, Cunningham noted, and he has helped raise $4.5 million for cancer research and local charities.
Smith, Cunningham wrote, worked to integrate Chapel Hill in the early 1960s and recruited and coached the first Black scholarship athlete at UNC.
The applications came with resolutions and letters of support from the Chapel Hill Town Council, the Chapel-Hill Carrboro chamber of commerce and other local groups. Jackie Jenks, who leads the Inter-Faith Council of Social Service in Carrboro, wrote a letter endorsing Dean Smith Highway.
“Of special meaning to IFC was Coach Smith’s unwavering support for civil rights both on and off the basketball court, which created opportunity for many,” Jenks wrote. “He championed social justice with his trademark compassion and humility, and to our profound delight, was a steadfast IFC supporter — a commitment his family continues today.
“We are delighted that a section of Interstate 40 will remind travelers of his legendary success in sport and in life,” she wrote.
The applications came with short notes from Roy Williams’ wife Wanda and Dean Smith’s son Scott expressing their support for the designations. There were also required forms, signed by Orange County Sheriff Charles Blackwood, attesting to each coach’s character and lack of a criminal record.
Scott Smith and two of his sisters, Kristen and Kelly, thanked the board via video links Wednesday.
“We are very pleased as a family that this is being done,” Scott Smith said. “We look forward to seeing the signs in the future.”
Smith, Williams join a long list of honorees
Since the 1920s, the state has named hundreds of roads and bridges after individuals, usually politicians, business leaders, veterans or people killed in battle or locally in the line of duty. On Friday, the McNair Road bridge over U.S 264 will be named for three Edgecombe County sheriff’s deputies killed in separate incidents between 1964 and 2018.
Some of the honorees are household names, including Andy Griffith (part of U.S. 52 near his hometown of Mt. Airy), James Taylor (a bridge over Morgan Creek in Chapel Hill) and Richard Petty (a bridge on I-40 near Black Mountain and part of U.S. 220 in Randolph County).
At least two other former UNC athletes have sections of highway named for them. A part of N.C. 150 in Gaston County is named for Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice, a tailback for the football team in the 1940s, and a section of I-40 near Wilmington honors Michael Jordan, who played three seasons for Smith and won a national championship with him in 1982.
Smith, whose name is on the Tar Heels home arena, had more wins, 879, than any other college men’s basketball coach when he retired in 1997. ESPN named him one of the best coaches of any sport in the 20th century, and President Barack Obama gave him a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013, a little over a year before he died at age 83.
Williams watched Smith coach as a student, when he played junior varsity at UNC, and later spent ten years as an assistant coach under him, including the 1982 championship season. He retired in April with 903 wins as a head coach at Kansas and UNC, the third most among college coaches.
The basketball floor at the Smith Center was named for Williams in 2018.
Roy Williams Highway will overlap with a longer stretch of I-40 named for Harriet Morehead Berry, who died in 1940. Berry’s varied career included heading the N.C. Good Roads Association in the early 1920s, when she campaigned for a system of hard-surface roads built and maintained by the state.
Designated in 1986, the Harriet Morehead Berry Highway now runs along I-40 between U.S. 15-501 and I-85. It will be shortened by four miles to make room for Williams.
This story was originally published December 8, 2021 at 2:35 PM with the headline "UNC’s Dean Smith and Roy Williams are immortalized on Triangle highway."
