KANSAS CITY, Mo. – In the hours following North Carolina’s 83-62 loss to Louisville on Jan. 12, Roy Williams was nowhere to be found in Chapel Hill. He was not at the Smith Center running his Tar Heels through countless 33s in the aftermath of the worst home loss in his 31 years as a head coach, nor was he unwinding at home with a Sprite Zero and golf tournament highlights.

Williams was on the road recruiting, sitting courtside for a high school junior power forward's game on Saturday night before heading to Florida on Sunday to see another recruit. While such an approach is the hallmark of a tireless recruiter, it also provides a glimpse into the inner workings of a man whose only response to adversity is to fight.

“I’ve been around him enough to know that he’s not going to back away from a situation,” longtime assistant coach Steve Robinson said. “He’s not going to back away. He’s going to work hard. It’s like if we lose a game, he thinks, ‘I need to be out working.’ It could be a Saturday game and then there’s a high school game Saturday night and instead of sitting around doing nothing, he’s like, ‘I’ve got to go work.’ That’s the way he’s always approached it in my 24 years of working with him and my 30-plus years of knowing him.”

UNC arrived in Kansas City on Wednesday as a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament for the third time in four years. Add in a No. 2 seed last season and this becomes the best four-year stretch with regard to NCAA Tournament seeding in school history, outdistancing the Michael Jordan and Tyler Hansbrough eras in Chapel Hill.

As improbable as that may sound, the mere suggestion of such a run four years ago would have been lunacy. The Tar Heels lost in the Sprint Center in Kansas City as a No. 8 seed to Kansas in the second round of the 2013 NCAA Tournament. A year later, they lost again in the second round, this time as a No. 6 seed to Iowa State. Only then did Williams’s world attempt to come crashing down.

In June 2014, the NCAA announced it was reopening its case into academic misconduct in the university’s African and Afro-American Studies department four months after the UNC Board of Governors commissioned Kenneth Wainstein’s independent investigation into the matter. Williams denied any wrongdoing and Wainstein supported that claim in his remarks following the release of the report in October 2014. Even so, the NCAA cloud settled above Chapel Hill, bringing with it significant media criticism, and that combination proved to be a significant recruiting hurdle for years to come.

At home, Williams was navigating health concerns as well as grief and loss. His knees were failing him, limiting his ability to play golf in the offseason and requiring a series of procedures, while his wife Wanda was also dealing with health issues. Then came a succession of deaths to men close to Williams, delivering emotional blow after emotional blow. Ted Seagroves, a longtime friend and golf partner, succumbed to pancreatic cancer in December 2014. Dean Smith passed in February 2015 following a long battle with a neurocognitive disorder. Bill Guthridge then died in May 2015 due to heart failure.

Williams often rotated his descriptive terms in reference to the adversity in his life, calling it “stuff” in one press conference and “junk” in the next. Yet the one place clear of debris with sharp clean lines was the basketball court and it was there that Williams found reprieve and salvation.

“I think when things are tough, when there are some negative things around and when things are happening to people you really care about, I think you dive into two areas,” Williams said recently. “You dive into your family a little bit more and you dive into your work a little bit more. My work is something that I love. I think I tried to focus even more on just the coaching part, just to work with the kids, just the recruiting and enjoy the times that I was able to get away, perhaps, but I really tried to focus on something that you can control.

“It was not a very pleasant time. It was not very pleasant some things people were saying or doing, but you’ve got to get through it and move on. I was proud of the fact that I could stay focused and could keep our kids focused on trying to be the best basketball team we could.”

Despite a seemingly constant NCAA drag on recruiting – UNC’s 2015 signing class of Luke Maye and Kenny Williams ranked 70th nationally, according to the 247Sports Composite – Williams found solace on the basketball court, once telling reporters the 94-by-50-foot rectangle was his savior and that if the “stuff” or the “junk” had done anything, it confirmed his love of the game.

“He always says this is his safe haven when he gets on the court,” UNC director of operations Sean May said. “He loves practice. That’s where he feels comfortable and it allows him to escape the reality of what’s going on in his life. I think he really invests in that. He obviously invests in recruiting, he still does a great job with that, but he loves what he does. It doesn’t feel like work to him. That’s probably why he’s still doing it because he truly enjoys it.

“As somebody who has been here and went through all of that and has seen all of that, I can really say that we don’t notice it. He comes into work every day. He tells us about it and he tells us when things happen and obviously we know it bothers him, but he attacks the day. He attacks the job. I think the thing about him is that he’s meticulous in preparation and planning and what he does, so it allows him to succeed in the little things that make it easy for him.”

There’s also his passion for North Carolina. Williams hitchhiked from Chapel Hill to Asheville and back again the first time he went home as a college student. He credits Smith for his coaching career, which explains why he felt as though he was letting the program down in 2010 – one year removed from winning a second national title in five years – when his team failed to reach the NCAA Tournament.

Once adversity struck hard, time and time again, questions began filtering in as to whether or not Williams was in his final days as UNC’s basketball coach. Such inquiries fail, not due to their wording but rather a lack of understanding of how Williams operates. If anything, the AFAM scandal, the recruiting woes, the health issues and the grief and loss fueled him even more to solidify UNC’s basketball program. It was the one thing he could control.

“I wasn’t worried about him,” Robinson said. “I understand that he’d want to change the fortunes here a little bit and move into some positive things, but this is the way he approaches things. If I work hard, I think good things will happen. I’m going to have a much greater chance of success by working hard as compared to sitting back and saying, ‘woe is me.’”

UNC, led by a starting five with an average national recruiting ranking of 126, plays No. 5 seed Auburn in the Midwest Region semifinals on Friday night. The Tar Heels have won 14 NCAA Tournament games since the 2015-16 season, which is tied for the third-most wins over a four-year span in school history and only two victories away from tying the record.