University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: One For The Wall
June 23, 2011 | Baseball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
June 23, 2011
By Adam Lucas
OMAHA, Neb.--During the Chapel Hill Regional, Carolina had to vacate the usual home dugout to fulfill NCAA rules requiring teams to alternate being home and visitor. That put James Madison in the Tar Heel dugout for one of the matchups with Carolina.
Before the first meeting between the Dukes and Tar Heels, several James Madison players were in the hallway that leads from the Carolina clubhouse to the dugout. Those walls are lined with celebratory photos from 2006-09, featuring dogpiles and posed shots from the four straight super-regional victories.
The Dukes moved from photo to photo, pointing out details on each one. "That's cool," one of them said.
Times like this, in the aftermath of Wednesday's 5-1 loss to Vanderbilt, sometimes you forget the coolness. The Tar Heels will add another photo to the wall this offseason, this time featuring what may have been the most jubilant celebration of any of the five trips to the College World Series in the past six years. That photo will show a team that somehow managed to cobble together one of the best seasons in school history despite, as Mike Fox said after the loss to the Commodores, "more adversity than we've had in past years."
Not pictured in that photo will be stunning trips to California (a season-opening 4-0 against the West Coast, including a win at Cal State Fullerton) and Tallahassee (where the Tar Heels won a series for the first time since 1995). Who knows? In hindsight, with a couple years of perspective applied, maybe we'll remember this group as the team that won 51 games and earned the third overall national seed, and we'll forget how they shocked everyone at nearly every opportunity. Win one game against the top team in the country, Virginia, in the closing weekend of the regular season? No, the 2011 Tar Heels decided to sweep them in front of the best regular season crowds in Boshamer Stadium history.
Eventually, with more than a couple days to think about it, those are the feelings we'll remember most about the 2011 baseball season. Right now, though, those Omaha results and the pair of losses to Vanderbilt feel freshest. Those big Commodore hits and Tony Kemp and Corey Williams and those runners left on base--right now, it doesn't seem possible to forget them.
Within a few months, by the time that photo is hanging on the wall in Boshamer Stadium, they'll be relegated to, "What was that guy's name?" status along with Josh Spence (2009 Arizona State), Tommy Mendonca (2008 Fresno State) and Chris Kunda (2006 Oregon State).
It is better, in athletics, to win. It would make this more fun. But it would not make it any more memorable, not for the players and coaches involved.
"I'm proud we were able to end our season in Omaha," Fox said. "I had a great group. They were fun to be around and they taught me a great deal, especially our seniors. We had fun together. I'm sorry our season has come to an end for that reason, because they have been a fun bunch to be around."
When they get together in a few years, much more so than any plays on the field--even the good ones--they'll talk about the fun. They'll mention Jimmy Messer's impromptu auction of his teammates during an NCAA Tournament rain delay, or Ben Bunting's piñata skit at the ACC Tournament, or the fact that none of his teammates ever knew Greg Holt as anything other than "Reggie," or Chaz Frank generously flipping the ball into the stands after catching a fly ball to end an inning...then sheepishly realizing there were only two outs.
They're selling off Rosenblatt Stadium on Thursday morning. Everything is being put up for auction, right down to the sinks and the bat racks and the signage. In Omaha, this is seen as an affront to history, but Carolina's trip to the College World Series in 2011 was a nice reminder that the facility doesn't hold the memories. Everything was just as unique, just as memorable in the brand new TD Ameritrade Park as it was in that rainbow-hued building straight down 10th Street.
Only seven members of the 2009 travel squad were on this 2011 team--Fox has basically now brought three different iterations of his program to Omaha, beginning with the Flack era, moving to the Ackley crew, and now with, maybe, the Moran bunch--and the new generation of Tar Heels in Omaha didn't lose anything in the experience by playing at the new stadium rather than the old. It's important that the new blood experiences the same success as the old guard. That's what keeps a program fresh instead of stagnant. Being able to relate to each other, being able to reminisce about the taste of the whiskey filet at the Drover or the atmosphere or opening ceremonies, that's what builds that baseball family.
As different as all of these Omaha teams have been--there have been five of them now, which still seems like an astonishing number--they've also seen some changes in their leadership. Fox is consistently one of the loosest Tar Heels in the program by the time his team gets to Omaha. There was a time when having the hubbub of a former President in his dugout would have unsettled him. Now, he seems to enjoy it. He's had a once in a lifetime experience five different times in the past six years, and it's gratifying that he seems to realize it.
"As a young coach, you don't think of the relationships, you wallow in self pity that you didn't win," Fox said Wednesday. "I take these memories with these kids with me. My phone is going off like crazy and I bet a lot are former players. That's what makes it special. You want these kids to have good memories when they leave. You want them to graduate and do the right thing when they leave here, because baseball will fade away. I'm comfortable and confident that will happen with every one of them. They're going to go on and be good citizens and make a good life for themselves. Ultimately, that's what we're supposed to be doing."
Those relationships will be evident in that photo that goes up on the wall in the near future. Mike Fox gets it.
Oh, and something else, too.
"All that aside," the coach added as his final official words in Omaha in 2011, "we're going to keep coming back and trying to win this thing."
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly. He is also the author or co-author of six books on Carolina basketball, including the official chronicle of the first 100 years of Tar Heel hoops, A Century of Excellence, which is available now. Get real-time UNC sports updates from the THM staff on Twitter.
