UAB Director of Athletics Brian Mackin announced Monday the hiring of University of North Carolina assistant coach Jerod Haase as the fifth head coach in the 34-year history of the Blazer men’s basketball program.

Haase, who turns 38 on April 1, played for Roy Williams at Kansas and has spent the last 13 years on Williams’ staff with the Jayhawks and North Carolina. He helped the Tar Heels to national championships in 2005 and 2009. Known as a top recruiter, he has also served as the head coach for the junior varsity team five times in his nine-year UNC tenure.

A 1997 Kansas graduate in business administration, Haase’s first job came at his alma mater as the Director of Basketball Operations from 1999-2003. During that time, the Jayhawks reached the 2002 Final Four and the national championship game in 2003.

When Williams was named head coach at North Carolina prior to the 2003-04 season, he brought Haase with him as an assistant coach and director of operations, a title he held from 2003-09. It was a unique position that rotated from assistant coach to director of operations every other year. Haase has served exclusively as an assistant coach since the 2009-10 season.

A native of South Lake Tahoe, Calif., Haase attended the University of California in 1992-93 and then transferred to Kansas. He helped lead the Jayhawks to three consecutive conference titles and finished his career ranked in the top 10 among school leaders in assists, three-point field goals and steals.

He started 99 of 101 games at Kansas and scored 1,264 points, averaging 12.5 per game and reaching double figures 74 times. While at KU, Haase was a candidate for the Naismith and Wooden Awards.

As a senior in 1996-97, Haase started with Jacque Vaughn, Scot Pollard, Paul Pierce and Raef LaFrentz as Kansas finished with a 34-2 record. He averaged 12.0 points per game despite playing with a broken wrist. As a sophomore in 1994-95, he scored 15.0 points a game, was named the Big Eight Conference Newcomer of the Year and also was tabbed a second-team all-conference selection.

Haase started 23 games in 1992-93 as a freshman at Cal, where he teamed in the backcourt with Jason Kidd.

Haase was a first-team GTE Academic All-American as a senior, a second-team Academic All-American as a junior and was an academic all-conference selection three times. The Jayhawks’ Male Scholar-Athlete of the Year in 1997, Haase later earned a master’s degree in business at KU in 2000.

Haase co-wrote “Floor Burns,” detailing the 1996-97 KU season, which sold more than 30,000 copies. Floor burns are a statistic the Kansas stat crew created in honor of Haase, who had 165 of them as a junior. He has also produced a basketball instructional video.

Born April 1, 1974, Haase is one of five brothers and sisters to play intercollegiate sports. He is married to the former Mindy Meidinger of Lenexa, Kan. The couple has two sons, Gavin (5) and Garrett (2), and a daughter, Gabrielle, born earlier this year.

– Release

In an article published on a pro-Creighton athletics website, basketball player Greg McDermott says he contacted UNC coach Roy Williams to let him know that his team wasn’t out to get North Carolina and certainly didn’t want to jeopardize the Tar Heels run to an NCAA title by hurting guard Kendall Marshall.

“We feel awful that Kendall Marshall got hurt,” McDermott said Monday. “There was not any malicious intent on Ethan’s part. (Ethan Wragge) It was just a basketball play and, unfortunately, Kendall landed on his wrist wrong. I wanted to make sure Roy knew how we felt. We have tremendous respect for each other. He’s a good friend of mine, and I wanted to make sure he knew that we felt bad that it happened.”

While it was a hard foul and one that the slow-footed, less athletic big man should have known better than to attempt it (in part because he was out of position on the play and because his team was down by 18 points at the time).

Despite replays showing Grant Gibbs slapping at John Henson’s bad wrist and Gregory Echenique clobbering Tyler Zeller about the head and neck, McDermott said Creighton is not a dirty team.

“Anyone that watched us play 35 games would know that we’re the farthest thing from being a physical, rough-housing team,” he said. “If anything, we’ve lacked physicality, but now we’re being made out to be the team that tried to bully North Carolina. The thing we feel bad about is the injury, because I would like to see North Carolina make a great run in this tournament.”

The one part of McDermott’s explanations that seems suspect is his characterization that Gibbs’ wink to the bench after slapping Henson’s wrist was simply to acknowledge to the team that he had gotten under Henson’s skin as the Carolina player was called for a technical after confronting Gibbs.

Even if that is true, how did Gibbs get under Henson’s skin? By slapping at his highly publicized bad wrist. McDermott, nor Gibbs, nor the Creighton coach are going to convince me that Gibbs wasn’t trying to hurt Henson. In football, it is common for guys to go after players who aren’t 100 percent. In basketball, while players will certainly be tested as to what they can and can’t do, it is not appropriate to intentionally go after an injury, especially with little protection available. Some would argue that it’s not appropriate in football either but football is supposed to be a physical game. Basketball, unfortunately, has evolved into more of a physical game but that’s not the history nor intention of basketball as opposed to football.

While excusing Gibbs’ physical play, to his credit McDermott did call out his other teammate Echenique, saying that he should have been called for an intentional flagrant foul for his decking of Zeller.

To read the original article, please click here.