Union News

Ann Hancock ’92 just loves competition. She’s made a career of it, spending the three decades since her Hall of Fame playing days forging a stellar career on the sidelines.

Competition drives her. It’s how she’s always measured herself, since she was a young girl in Elizabethtown, N.C., showing adults how it’s done in pickup basketball or trying to become the first person to serve a perfect game at volleyball camp.

“With sports, either you’re good enough or you’re not,” Hancock says. “It’s the bottom of the ninth, with two outs and the bases loaded, and you either get a hit or you don’t. And you have to live with the consequences.”

It’s not exactly life or death, she knows, but it is important – especially what comes afterward. These are the moments that define a person, Hancock tells her Bulldog players these days. These are the moments that show, and refine, your character.

“You’re either going to get a hit or you’re going to get out, you either win or lose, but what you do next – that’s what life is about,” Hancock says. “You’re going to win some; you’re going to lose some. But how do you bounce back from that, and can you live with, ‘I gave it my best, and it wasn’t good enough’? Can you be like, ‘OK, I’m going to keep trying,’ because there are things in life where you give it your best shot and you didn’t get what you wanted out of it. Can you recover from that?”

Hancock’s players are used to speeches like that. She’s more than a coach; she’s a mentor, in every respect of the word.

Before she became a coach, Hancock had her mentors too. The Little League coach who picked her, the only girl at tryouts, and then let her start at first base. The team went undefeated. He later coached her in basketball, and there, too, he recognized her tenacity, combined with a sense of perspective. So did Johnny Jacumin, Wingate’s Hall of Fame coach who recruited Hancock and her extraordinary jump shot (which she used to score 2,276 points in her high-school career, before the 3-point shot became standard in basketball).

Hancock was always more than a basketball player, more than an athlete, and today she understands the totality of the person she is recruiting. At Wingate, she became a Wingate Sports Hall of Famer because of her on-court contributions; she was also the school’s first Academic All-American.

Hancock returned to her alma mater in 2012 after two decades of coaching at NCAA Division I schools, and she’s been a leader, motivator and mentor ever since. When there’s a volunteer opportunity, her team is there. Her Bulldogs are regular participants at One Day, One Dog service projects and always pitch in during the United Way Day of Caring. The team becomes invested in the community that supports them on game day.

But perhaps Hancock’s biggest act of service is preparing her players for life after basketball.

“We have our Bulldog Basics: Be on time, tell the truth, do what’s right, treat others like you want to be treated, and exceed expectations,” she says. “If you’ll do those things, no matter where you are, you’ll be successful.”

All of those dictums can be transferred to the classroom, the boardroom, the workplace, and social settings. Hancock’s team is its own lab of difference-making: a contained environment, with basically black-and-white outcomes, in which young people can test themselves, fail until they succeed, and train themselves to live by the Bulldog Basics.

“Coach always talks about how you can’t wait for your dreams and can’t wait for what you want,” says senior Bryanna Troutman, a three-time first-team All-SAC performer. “You have to fight for it, work for it, do whatever you need to do to achieve your goals, whether it’s on the court, in class or just in life. You earn what you get.”

“I want to be the best – the best teacher, the best coach,” says former Bulldog player Amber Neely ’16, ’17 (MASM), now girls basketball coach at Julius Chambers High. “A lot of the stuff I do to get there came from Ann Hancock: being on time, doing what’s right all the time, exceeding expectations, not just being average or doing the minimum just to pass by.”

Hancock taught Neely to “realize her why.”

“Why am I doing what I’m doing?” Neely says. “She definitely helped me realize that when I was in college. For me, it’s my family. They motivate me.”

Hancock has lived the Bulldog Basics principles for years. After graduating from Wingate, she was offered a job as a graduate assistant with the women’s basketball program at UNC Chapel Hill. The offer hadn’t come out of the blue; Hancock had worked for it. She’d impressed the UNC staff after her senior season of high school during the 1988 East-West All-Star Game, where she outperformed many of their recruits. During college, she drove to Greensboro on the weekends to help coach one of the top AAU teams in the state. She worked Carolina’s basketball camps every summer, eagerly jumping in to referee, a job absolutely no one wanted.

“I wasn’t really afraid to do the work,” she says. “I try to tell my girls, ‘You’ve got to put yourself in the right place. Don’t expect anybody to come knocking on your door.’ Working their camps, I sort of put myself in front of them to show, ‘I’ll work. I’ll do anything you need me to do.’”

In her second year on the UNC staff, the Tar Heels won the national championship. “I should have retired then,” Hancock says with a laugh.

It’s to Wingate’s benefit that she didn’t. After eight years in Chapel Hill, Hancock spent 10 respectable years as the head coach at NCAA Division I UNC Wilmington before returning to her alma mater, where she’s won at least 20 games eight times and has claimed five South Atlantic Conference titles: three tournament crowns and two in the regular season, including last year, when at one point her Bulldogs reeled off 18 straight wins.

This year, the Bulldogs notched an 11-game win streak and are 22-7 so far. They are awaiting word on a possible NCAA tournament bid.

Her competitive fire still burning hot, Hancock wants to win another title or two this year. But she also tries to get her players to understand that although outcomes mean something, setting your sights on something tangible and working toward it is what’s most important.

“I ask some players now, ‘What are your goals?’ They’re like, ‘What are you talking about?’” Hancock says. “They are afraid to set that goal, because they might not get there. They are afraid to fail.

“If I could give them a gift now, it would be that: There’s nothing wrong with setting a goal and coming up short. That’s OK, as long as you know that you did what you were supposed to do to get there.”

Want to support the women’s basketball team or give to another area of campus? Contact Brittany Peper, with the Office of Advancement, or give here, and be sure to show your support during One Day, One Dog, on March 30.

Original source can be found here.