Chuck Burton/Associated Press
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Sylvia Hatchell, the University of North Carolina’s women’s basketball coach, used to preach about “the fishbowl.”
“You’re always in the fishbowl,” Hatchell would tell players like Tonya Sampson, a former player who recalled the admonitions in an interview on Friday. “You never know who’s watching. You’ve always got to carry yourself with integrity and the best way you can.”
Twenty-five years after Hatchell and Sampson won a national title for North Carolina, Hatchell’s reputation is in peril and her team is in turmoil. U.N.C. officials, who were told late last month about three episodes that some players thought revealed Hatchell to be racially insensitive and aloof, placed her and her assistants on paid administrative leave and opened a storied program to abrupt scrutiny.