University of North Carolina Athletics
So Much More
February 20, 2006 | Softball
Feb. 20, 2006
By Lyndsey A. Beam, Special to TarHeelBlue.com
The countdown to game time has started, warm ups have finished and now there is just time to wait. Outside the field, UNC softball standout Anna Evans is visualizing the game in her head. A pitch is coming her way, it's fast and the ball is getting bigger and bigger as it catapults toward her, what is she going to do with it, how is she going to react? "I have one chance," she thinks. "I have to make it count." With all the force she can muster she swings at the once little round ball that now seems bigger than life. Wait--maybe it is her life and this is her only chance. She hits...it's a home run, she's won.
* * *
She grew up playing baseball with her younger twin brothers Matt and Brad, in the backyard of their rural home in Fairmont, NC. She grew up always putting academics before athletics....always. She grew up unique from every other girl, said brother Matt. "She was always going places and doing things and accomplishing things."
Now at the juvenile age of 19, Anna Evans' life has taken her places and done things that most people have on their "top ten things I want to do before I die" list. She's been to the ends of the earth and the depths of the sea, in every meaning of the phrase. As a standout shortstop for the varsity softball team and Morehead scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Anna Evans' life has captured experiences most people have only seen in those deep stages of sleep. She is so much more; she has done so much more.
Wow, you say. What's the catch on this girl? A varsity athlete and recipient of the most prestigious scholarship given to one of the best colleges in the nation? What's her deal?
"Dedicated," says younger brother Matt.
"Tenacious," says assistant coach Dave Young.
"Dynamic," says head coach Donna Papa.
"Superhuman," says close friend Patrick Pait.
* * *
Taking life lightly was never a choice for the Evans children. Before they could ever go outside and play they had to finish all their schoolwork while other kids laughed it off and said, "We'll just copy yours." Student before athlete has been ingrained in them since day one.
"Our parents pretty much instilled to us that if you don't work hard then you're not getting anywhere," said Matt. "So all of us work hard and pretty much want to succeed and believe if we don't bust our rear ends then we're not going anywhere and we're not gonna make money when we get out of [college]."
So the two Carolina alumni parents have implanted a driving motivation into their three Tar Heel children, and Anna has shifted life into fourth gear. "Anna's reputation at Lumberton High School was the girl that did it all," said friend Stephen McIntyre. "I think a lot of people were jealous of Anna because Anna did everything better than everybody else; she was the up and coming everything."
Her senior year, Anna held five batting records for the Lumberton Pirates; she was the first freshman to play varsity women's basketball at Lumberton in 30 years and led them to win the 2001 state 4-A championship in the Dean Smith Center; she was named the 2003 female Athlete of the Year by the North Carolina High School Athletic Association, and she graduated valedictorian of her class.
"Wherever we went we were kind of known as `Anna's brothers,'" said Matt. "It was very different; in a way a lot easier sometimes because in all your classes your teachers already liked you before you went in."
* * *
And that's another thing...everyone likes Anna. Arrogance and egotism have never pulsated through her veins.
"Every time you see Anna she is smiling," said Young.
"She's very approachable," said Matt. "She's a hard person not to like when you meet her, she's not really mean...usually."
She was seven and they were five. Anna and Matt had convinced Brad that the rabbit droppings in the backyard were "special M&M's." But while Matt was content to see Brad eat them, Anna, when he got them up to his mouth, interjected and exclaimed, "No, No! They're rabbit droppings!"
But that's another thing about Anna, she's always has everyone else's best interests in mind. Perhaps that's what makes her such a great leader on the field. She is co-captain of the 2005-2006 Tar Heel softball team and she is also the academic team captain.
"With Anna, one of her big attributes is she wants her team to really excel," says Young. "I mean she has to do well for the team to do well but she is team-oriented. When she talks about practices with the coaches, it's always because of other feedback from her other teammates that she transfers to the coaches."
Academic team captain? During her time at UNC, Anna has consistently had a spot on the ACC Academic Honor Roll and Dean's List and she strives to help her teammates secure the same honors. But as a Morehead scholar, Anna's academic life has been taken to a whole different realm outside of the normal Carolina student.
* * *
Her mother, Jeanette, brought the large padded envelope to Lumberton High School that day because she just couldn't wait for Anna to get home from school to open it. Anna and her mother stepped into the principal's office to uncover the outcome of the goal Anna had been working toward for years.
"It was a pretty big envelope so I thought it might be good news," said Anna with a smile. "And it was."
"When Anna got it she was very ecstatic," recalls Matt. "But maybe not as ecstatic as my Mom."
Jeanette had made Anna aware of the Morehead scholarship when she was in the seventh grade. Being a born and bred Tar Heel made the award seem even more desirable to her.
"Ever since my Mom told me about it I was like `Man, that's pretty cool, they pay for you to go to school and do all these cool summer things.'" So this is where the ends of the earth and the depths of the sea come in.
Every summer the Morehead foundation allows their scholars to travel around the globe to study and do community service work. In her excursions to Colorado; Cristo Rey, Costa Rica; and Townsville, Australia, she has worked with children, started school programs, defeated language barriers and dived in the Great Barrier Reef to study reef conservation.
"She is a girl that can take care of herself for sure," said Pait, who traveled with Evans in Australia. "For two days we ate basically nothing but salami and cheese sandwiches and some chocolate chip cookies called tim tams for lunch and dinner."
Pait, Evans and another friend rented a car to drive around the outback and see the sights. But remember their right side of the road is the other right side of the road to us.
"She only messed up once in a place called Goomeri, she took a right into the right lane and we started laughing and screaming and she corrected herself," Pait said. "We were glad she messed up too because we all had."
And that's something to take to make note of. Anna is human--not superhuman.
* * *
It may sound as though her life has tightly followed the straight and narrow path without ever running off course. Yes she is a varsity softball player and yes she is an academic whiz kid, but her success has never gone without spoil.
In her sophomore year at Lumberton High, Anna was in the peak of her adolescence like most girls her age. She was traveling from state to state competing in athletic tournaments, she was excelling in her advanced placement courses, she had her friends and she had her family. But her mother Jeanette, the rock of the Evans family, was suddenly diagnosed with esophageal cancer. She was having problems swallowing but doctors had lent it to post nasal drip. However, with the return of test results they found a tumor the size of the inside of a toilet paper roll.
Anna was crushed. Suddenly the rock of her family was crumbling and she was forced to pick up the pieces to hold her family together. Her mother was everything to her and their family. Not only was she the mother and wife, she was the accountant to her husband's dental practice. Anna was given no choice. On top of her class load, on top of her burgeoning athletic career, on top of everything else a high school girl deals with, Anna was propelled into a role that had come 20 years premature.
"It was probably the hardest year I had," said Anna, but that should go without saying. Today all is well with Jeanette; her diagnosed 5-percent survival rate has long been outlived.
* * *
She had come upon her senior year as a Lumberton Pirate. She was the paramount catcher against their archrival Purnell Swett in the Two Rivers Conference. Not even halfway into the game Anna was disqualified for plowing over the Lady Rams catcher. Not only was Anna taken aback by the call, but also the whole city of Lumberton. Articles and editorials swamped The Robesonian in utter disbelief that Anna Evans, the girl who did no wrong, would ever be shown the door on her home turf--or on anyone's turf for that matter. Anna's response?
"Brain fart by me, I don't know what I was thinking."
That's it. The flawless, perfectionist, Anna Evans attributed her disqualification to a brain fart.
"She was joking about it," said Matt. "She got thrown out for kind of pushing the catcher and she said if she knew she would get thrown out then she would have hit her harder."
* * *
Freshman year; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; varsity softball; Morehead scholarship. There is probably no more of an ideal situation to have going into college. She was donned in Carolina blue and sporting her new number--19, a number she's fanatically proud of. Why? Just because it's her number--19 is in her heart. She had everything at her disposal and the world to conquer, but yet, her year wasn't going as planned.
She wasn't playing well. It seemed as though her all-star, standout days had gone. There was no one around cheering AN-na Ev-ans, clap-clap, clapclapclap. The competition was stiffer and the game was harder. She couldn't seem to get it together and found herself engulfed in a whirlwind of problems that suddenly obstructed her once clear path to success.
"Freshman year I pretty much sucked," Anna recalled bitterly. "It was the worst offensive year I've ever had....ever. I think mentally I didn't do as good of a job dealing with not playing well and one thing led to another. I just kept snowballing."
"When I first got here, the big thing with Anna, obviously physically she's very good but her confidence was absolutely shot," said assistant coach Young. "I just had to go off what everybody said about [her freshman year], but apparently she was just a head case."
What do you do when you've known almost nothing but pure success in your lifetime? What happens when you suddenly forget how to do something you've done your entire life? The answer seemed out of reach. This time a ball was barreling toward her and her arms were limp in attempting to swing.
The only thing she could gather to fend off her self-destruct was that inner drive her parents instilled in her growing up.
"I got to the point that I was so frustrated, but not to the point of wanting to quit. If I'm not doing well with something then that's not what I want to do is walk away from it, I want to fix it until I get better at it at least, not just walk away from it."
Rather than walking away, Anna marched her way to the softball complex everyday to conquer her plaguing weaknesses. Her work ethic was raging and she was determined not to give up. She spent one-on-one time with her coaches and slowly began to mend what was broken. What was broken? What started the snowball?
"Frustration," said Young. "When she wasn't doing well, not being able to correct it, and by not being able to correct it she gets to the ball game and she goes in already tentative about the ball game itself. And to be quite honest, you don't have to fix things. The individual has to believe that it's fixed and then [they're] just as good of a player as if it is honestly fixed."
So her confidence was shot, but Anna--dedicated, tenacious, dynamic, superhuman Anna, with the help of others, hurdled her way over her freshman jinx and is now back to where she is comfortable--on top of the world.
"She's always been a very athletic player and a very intelligent player," said Coach Papa. "I think it's just a matter of as you mature and you gain more playing time and you gain more experience, you gain more confidence and I think that's really what changed for her."
"With Anna, freshman year was basically, not a waste of time, but you could chalk it up when she went up there, she wasn't really successful," said Young. "We didn't do a tremendous amount of change to her swing; we did a couple of little things. It boosted her confidence and she went from nothing to all-ACC."
* * *
"She's our biggest offensive threat on the field right now," said Young without giving it a hint of thought. "Here's a girl that hit 9th in the lineup her freshman year and now she's third and she's at a critical spot in the lineup."
She continues to get better everyday, she goes way beyond the call of duty--she does so much more.
"She is dedicated to everything she does," described Matt. "Everything she does she completes to her fullest ability. She definitely goes at it all out all the time and I respect that because most people don't do it like that. Most people slack off during summers and she's probably the only one who keeps working like you're supposed to all summer long."
"She goes after the ball full out," said Coach Papa. "She really tries to improve her base-running. Up at the plate she's really committed to trying to do her job whether it's bunting, hitting behind the runner, doing whatever."
Today she's a different person than she was in 2004. Rather than being scared of the game, being scared of that ball barreling toward her, she is prepared, she wants to take it on.
"She wants the ball hit to her when the game's on the line," said Young. "She wants to be the batter up to hit; she wants to be the runner who counts."
And she is the one who counts. In fact, she counts so much that the whole Tar Heel team looks to Anna as their leader.
"If Anna is up there batting and she gets blown away then everybody gets a little timid," notes Young. "The majority are saying, `Gah-lee, if Anna can't hit it...' And no matter how good the pitcher is, if Anna goes up there and drills a ball then you can see everyone is chomping at the bit to get a shot at it. The girls said last year, `If we could mold Anna and have a bunch of Anna's on the team then we'd never lose a ball game.'"
* * *
Suddenly Anna breaks out of her visualization of the game. Game time is here, the 2006 season has begun. Soon it will be her turn to hit and she'll step on the plate. Her confidence is at 100% and her teammates are looking on from the sidelines. She hits...it's a home run.
