Dean Smith treated women sportswriters with respect Posted Feb 19, 2015 Helen Ross remembers feeling nervous. As a sportswriter for The Greensboro News & Record in the 1980s, she had been assigned the task of interviewing University of North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith on a controversial subject. "We were doing a story on athletes and drugs,'' she said. "I knew it wasn't something he would really want to discuss. (Fayetteville Observer)