University of North Carolina Athletics
From Fetzer To Finley: Balancing Act
November 28, 2011 | General, Dave Lohse, Featured Writers
Nov. 28, 2011
By Dave Lohse
Associate Athletic Communications Director
Two weeks ago today, Bubba Cunningham became the athletic director at the University of North Carolina. He inherited an overall athletic program that top to bottom is as good as any in America.
Cunningham, who built excellent overall programs at Ball State and Tulsa, should feel right at home as a Tar Heel. Over the past four decades, coaching and administrative hires made by former athletic directors Bill Cobey, John Swofford and Dick Baddour are still bearing fruit to this day. Those hires have established an athletic program that not only thrives on success, but has become used to it. And our fans have become used to that success as well. Expectations are high, but trust me, that's a very good thing indeed. Would we have it any other way?
In Cunningham's second week on the job, three Tar Heel teams suffered bumps in the road. The top-ranked field hockey team fell in the NCAA finals in overtime, the women's soccer team exited in the NCAA Round of 16 in the dreaded penalty kick shootout format and the No. 1-rated men's basketball team lost its top ranking as fired up UNLV took down the Tar Heels after they had traveled cross country for the second time in three weeks.
Each of these results were devastating for the teams involved, more so for field hockey and women's soccer teams because their respective season ended in cruel and sudden fashion. Those two programs have brought so much honor to the University over the years your heart aches for the way their seasons came to a close.
So used are we to success it's easy to forget what those teams accomplished. Most schools in the country would die to have the seasons they had. Meanwhile, men's basketball has plenty of time to rebound, women's basketball is off to a great start, the swimming and diving teams are both ranked in the Top 12 and every fall sports team qualified for the post season. The outlook for the spring sports season which will begin in January is high indeed with several teams expected to make deep NCAA Tournament runs.
In the present, UNC volleyball is back in the NCAA Tournament, the men's soccer team is a win away from a fourth straight College Cup, both cross country teams were well represented at NCAAs and we beat Duke in football for the 21st time in 22 years. All those things happened during the same aforementioned week. Despite a lot of obstacles, Carolina football will be bowling once again and this week the basketball team gets a shot at a pair of Top 10 teams in Wisconsin and Kentucky.
I think we are so used to success at Carolina that every once in a while we can't see the forest for the trees. When seasons fall short of national championships that's a tough pill to swallow but also a reminder that this program as a whole is as balanced as they get. Carolina has finished in the Top 10 of the Directors' Cup standings all but three times since 1994. Twenty-four of 28 sports a year ago qualified for post-season play. Only 20 sports are allowed to score in the Directors' Cup standings each year so last year UNC was forced to throw away a quartet of national placings in the final count.
This kind of balance and the success we've become accustomed to exists for three primary reasons. First, Carolina is just an awesome place to attract student-athletes to--academically, athletically and in the overall student-athlete experience. Second, administrators at this school have been visionaries who have been ahead of the learning curve in building facilities for competition, academic support, sports medicine and leadership infrastructure. Third, the coaching hires going back to the mid-1970s have been stellar. Check that, even back to the late 1960s, when Ron Miller came to UNC to start one of the nation's top fencing programs.
When I arrived on this campus in 1977, three of the coaches I began working with almost from the start of my tenure here were Anson Dorrance (soccer), Frank Comfort (swimming) and Willie Scroggs (lacrosse). All three were hired by Bill Cobey, who served as the athletic director from 1976-80, and when it comes to Olympic sports at UNC, those three men established a gold standard of success. John Swofford and Dick Baddour followed Cobey's lead over the next 30 years in making a slew of outstanding hires which held up over time. Going forward, expect that Bubba Cunningham will follow suit.
To maintain a program of this standard, it is a balancing act. Success breeds success but it can never be taken for granted. Talent doesn't win in a vacuum. Even in what may be perceived as our worst athletic weeks on the field of play, Carolina remains something special indeed.
We just have to remind ourselves of that very fact.
