University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: #DoIt4Em
December 31, 2014 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
By Adam Lucas
Twenty minutes before tipoff of Tuesday night's Carolina-William & Mary basketball game, my postgame column found me.
It arrived in the person of Roy Williams, the Hall of Fame basketball coach and occasional GoHeels.com story generator. He was headed back towards the Smith Center locker room to talk to his team when our paths happened to cross. He pulled me aside.
“You don't need me to tell you what makes a good story,” he said. “But that youngster right over there has a good story.”
And then he was off to coach the game, which eventually ended in an 86-64 victory that was mostly forgettable except for a minor blowup midway through the second half when some miscommunication combined with some officiating confusion ignited Williams, the Smith Center crowd and the Tar Heels—in that order.
Sitting on the first row behind the UNC bench for the evening was Zach Hunter, an eighth grader from Wilson. On Dec. 9, Zach's 19-year-old sister, Emilee, was killed in a car accident. She was buried on Dec. 12. At the graveside service, her boyfriend, Cole Dudley, asked Zach to go with him to place the first rose on Emilee's casket.
As they laid the rose, Cole told Zach, “I want 30 points tonight.”
Zach had an eighth grade basketball game for Wilson Christian Academy that evening against Raleigh Friendship Christian. Just playing in the game seemed like a monumental undertaking; he'd just buried his sister. Scoring 30 points? That was a nice thought, but really nothing more than a nice thought.
But Zach pumped in 12 points in the first quarter, and eventually ended with exactly 30. “I was in shock,” Zach said on Tuesday night. “When I got home after the game, I had to sit there for a minute, like, 'That really happened.'”
Immediately after the game, something else happened: Zach and Emilee's story began to go viral on social media, as friends and family spread the word using the #DoIt4Em hashtag. Marcus Paige retweeted the story, as did several other Tar Heels. And when WRAL broadcast a feature on Zach, the story came to the attention of several UNC administrators, who connected with WRAL's Jeff Gravley to contact the Hunter family just before game time on Tuesday.
“We were about to leave,” Zach said, “and someone called my dad and said Roy Williams was going to talk to me.”
“He lit up,” said Craig Hunter, Zach's dad. “I've always been a Carolina fan, and he's always loved Carolina.”
In fact, Zach's pregame chat with Williams was actually his second interaction with the head coach. This past summer, Zach attended Carolina Basketball Camp for the first time. Each day features a free throw contest among the various groups in camp, and Zach advanced to the finals one day at the Smith Center. He had to make two free throws to win; right at that moment, Williams went and stood beneath the goal at which Zach was shooting.
Zach grew up a rabid Tar Heel fan, and most specifically, a rabid Tyler Hansbrough fan. He wore the No. 50 jersey, watched every game on television, knew all the stats and all the players. Now he was shooting free throws and Roy Williams was watching with his arms folded, the same way he might have watched Hansbrough hoist a charity toss during his Carolina career.
As Zach recounted the story to his family later, he said, “I didn't think there was any way I could make a free throw with Roy Williams standing there.” But he made them both, winning the contest.
And then, five months later, he found himself sitting next to the head coach on the Carolina bench in the minutes before a Tar Heel game. Williams had asked to meet with Zach before the game, and they connected around 6:35 on the Smith Center court.
During the course of the conversation, Williams asked Zach where he was sitting, and Zach pointed up towards the Smith Center rafters, closer to the banners than to the court.
Williams knew how to solve that. Within minutes, Zach and his father were in seats on the first row behind the Carolina bench.
“He had good advice for me,” Zach said. “We talked about how to get through this, about how I need to keep striving and not let this define me. He told me to do what Emilee would want me to do—not just play in one game for her, but to play hard in every game for her.”
“The times our family has spent together at Carolina games have always been special to our family,” Craig Hunter said. “Something like this shows you why Carolina basketball matters to so many people. Coach Williams took some of his time right before a game to talk to Zachary. Everyone here has made us feel like we are at home.”
Zach stood for most of the second half, and was still standing and cheering for the alma mater and the fight song after the game. On the way home, he'll talk about the day when he sat on the Tar Heel bench before a game and chatted with Roy Williams. Yes, he, Zach Hunter, sat on the Smith Center bench and talked with the Tar Heel head coach.
The story most everywhere on Wednesday will be about Williams' blowup during the game, about taking off his jacket and getting a technical foul and storming around the court. Here's the real story: Williams gave a kid who has had a terrible month a day he'll remember the rest of his life, plus a fun, worry-free two hours at a Carolina game with his dad as they sat on the front row cheering on the team they've loved for their entire lives. That's a story.
Zach would, he said on Tuesday night, really like to tell Emilee about his incredible day. And he knew exactly what her response would be.
“She would say,” Zach said, “for me to save her a seat.”
