University of North Carolina Athletics
CAROLINA: Champagne Supernova
November 20, 2013 | Football, Featured Writers, Turner Walston
This story originally appeared in the November 12 issue of CAROLINA: The Magazine.
Allen Champagne knows where he's supposed to be. The junior defensive lineman is one of three players on the punt shield, the last line of defense against would-be blockers. Champagne's job is to hold them off long enough for a punt to get away. A defender with a head start meeting the 6'4, 285-pound Champagne can make for a big impact. “I get maybe ten plays a game, so when I get in there, I just want to make sure they know who I am,” Champagne says.
The students on campus know who he is, if only by his last name. “I'm pretty sure that 40 percent of the people that know me don't even know my first name,” he says. “They just know Champagne.”
A Morehead-Cain scholar, Champagne arrived in Chapel Hill in 2011 from Montreal, Quebec. Like many Canadian children, he grew up playing hockey. But as he got bigger and outgrew his teammates, Champagne turned to football. “I've always had this tendency to hit people, so I guess football was a better sport,” he says.
Champagne had many options for after high school. He chose Carolina and the Morehead-Cain scholarship over Canada's prestigious Loran Scholars program partly to play football in the United States. “That was one of my conditions (for accepting the Morehead-Cain),” he says. “I was like, 'Look, I'm playing football in college.” He was offered the chance to be a preferred walk-on. “I signed the paper, and I'm on my way.” Though he did not appear in any games in 2011, Champagne played in six games last season, primarily on special teams. Football may have been the final piece in getting Champagne to Chapel Hill, but his impact at and around Carolina can be felt far beyond the field. He's perhaps the most service-oriented member of the football program, eager to give back to his adopted community. “I never had much when I was younger,” he says. “It was me, my two sisters and my mom, so I've always been kind of the leader of the family, and that carries on when I'm here.” Champagne often spends time at UNC Hospitals meeting children and their families. He's heavily involved with Carolina Dreams, a student-led organization that brings children being treated at North Carolina Children's Hospital to an athletic event. “There's so much we can do with so little, just being there, showing up and signing a poster for these families,” Champagne says.
Sunday morning after the football team's game with Virginia, Champagne already had plans to have breakfast with a family of a North Carolina Childrens Hospital patient. He says he has no trouble recruiting his teammates to join him on outreach events. “I thought I would be by myself, but then I asked some of the guys. Nazair Jones, one of the freshmen was like, 'Yeah man, I'll come with you.' I think it's cool that we get some of the guys that come with us and give back to the community.”
Student-athletes have to strike the right balance of academics, athletics and their social lives. Benton Moss, a pitcher on the Tar Heel baseball team and fellow Morehead-Cain scholar, says Champagne walks that line well. “Some people think that there's an inherent tradeoff between time spent on homework and time spent on athletics,” Moss says. “For a select few, and Allen is in this group, there is no tradeoff. He can do both and do both well. There are very few people who can do that.”
When he arrived on campus, Champagne immediately had two established circles to welcome him: the football team and Morehead-Cain scholars. “I was just very blessed,” he says. “I had two really solidified kind of groups of people that I knew, and then I'm a social guy, so when I go to class I just kind of work my way around. The people at UNC are very nice, southern hospitality, you know? They see the kid from Canada, and it's kind of like, 'Oh you're Champagne.' It's easy to remember when I meet somebody, and that kind of helped me out too.”
South Carolina's Victor Hampton certainly knows Champagne. In the first quarter of the season opener in Columbia, Hampton looked to break a return (“Victor's got an alley,” ESPN's Rece Davis said), but he got toasted by Champagne at the 37-yard line. Hard. “That was amazing,” Champagne says. “That just made my whole life of football worth it. I still hear about it every day. If I get down, I'll go watch it on YouTube. I think the biggest thing was it gave a lot of people at home hope. It's possible to go from a bad high school to work hard and make it to the level where you want to be and get a big hit on national TV.”
The hit was a key stop on a punt return, sure, but for Champagne it meant much more. Here was a Morehead-Cain scholar making a punishing tackle. He may have only been on the field for six punts, but he made the most of it.
When asked of Champagne's role on the field, Larry Fedora reaches for the obvious, at first, but it's clear that Champagne is more than just the guy with the Quebecois accent. “Well, he's the only Canadian we've got, you know?” Fedora says. “A very, very intelligent kid who loves playing. I mean he loves being on this field. I think it means a lot to him to be a Tar Heel football player and he's got a great attitude all the time. He is on the shield for the punt team and that is a very, very critical position on your football team. It's a team where you put a very trustworthy person that you know is going to get his job no matter what.”
In talking to his head coach, his teammates, and Champagne himself, it's clear that the young man values every single time he steps onto the football field, no matter how seldom. Senior defensive end Kareem Martin says at an early defensive line meeting prior to the season, Champagne burst into tears of appreciation when speaking of his role on the punt team. “He just started crying about how much passion he had with those reps,” Martin says. Seeing Champagne's emotion over a handful of plays in a game made Martin appreciate his own role on the team. “I may be getting 60, 70 reps a game, and that just made me cherish each one of those reps even more, and I just knew the importance of each rep that I had,” Martin says.
Martin calls Champagne a “model citizen student-athlete” in the way he lives fully into each of those roles. Fedora appreciates the attitude he brings to the practice field as well. “He comes out here he's hopping and skipping, he's so happy to be out here on the football field,” Fedora says. “It doesn't matter if it's the first day of fall camp or we're into our hundredth practice, whatever it is. He's the same way and he always enjoys being out here.”
Champagne's size and energy may fool those who meet him at first. Moss says he has friends who do double takes when told that Champagne is in fact a Morehead-Cain scholar. He describes Champagne as “a big ol' teddy bear who has a phenomenal brain.” Champagne plans to put that brain to use after graduation. He's double majoring in exercise and sport science and biology with a minor in chemistry, with the goal of becoming an orthopedic surgeon, perhaps in the military. He's interned with Dr. Jeff Spang at UNC Hospitals and figures he'll go to medical school in Quebec to be closer to his mother. He'd also like to strengthen the link between Canadian high school football and colleges in the United States, to create more opportunities for young men like himself.
Champagne is the driven college student with a clear direction toward the future. Whether it's in the classroom, in the shield on the punt team, or at the hospital visiting a sick child, Champagne says, “I know exactly where I want to be.”
