University of North Carolina Athletics
Extra Points: Freak Out
June 23, 2015 | Football, Featured Writers
By Lee Pace, GoHeels.com
Carolina's football coaches were sitting around the meeting table in early February 2012 talking about plans for their recruiting event scheduled around the Tar Heels vs. Duke basketball game in a few days. The topic turned to their June camp schedule and what they might do to spice up and spruce up a one-day camp built around inviting the elite rising junior and senior players on their recruiting list to Chapel Hill.
“Everyone's doing the 'Friday Night Lights' theme,” said Larry Fedora, just over two months into his new job as the Tar Heels' head coach. “We have to be different. We have to stand out.”
Someone picked up on the moniker used by the wide receivers position group, “Freaks.” Someone added, “Freak Show.” Someone else added, “Fedora's Freak Show.”
And thus a brand was born. Over the next several months, staff graphic designer Tony Tucker fashioned a “Fedora's Freak Show” logo around an idea from a 1974 poster for a horror flick called Freakmaker. Staff videographer Chris Luke created a montage of crunching hits and big plays accented with thunder, creepy voices, haunting music and even a brief shot of offensive tackle Brennan Williams with the plastic fangs he liked to wear during games. The video was touted and Tweeted on a couple of college football blogs, went viral on Youtube and to date has been played more than 20,000 times. And to cap off the itinerary of football drills and competition over 90 minutes, someone suggested a dodgeball tournament with the winning team of recruits facing the Tar Heel coaching staff; that segment was introduced on the video board with a cut of the crusty Patches O'Houlihan character from the movie Dodgeball.
The inaugural Freak Show was held in June 2012 and was part of the staff's campaign which the following February landed players the ilk of T.J. Logan, Ryan Switzer, Khris Francis, Nazair Jones, Mitch Trubisky, Des Lawrence and Brian Walker.
“One word encapsulated the night—energy,” said receivers coach Gunter Brewer.
“It's like a lot of things around here—hip and new-age,” added defensive tackle Tim Jackson, a rising junior who watched from the sidelines with a couple dozen of his teammates.
Michael Switzer was in Kenan Stadium that night, having driven son Ryan down from Morganton, W.Va. for the event. So pumped was Ryan, a rising high school senior being pursued by the likes of Penn State, West Virginia and Florida State, that he had the training staff slice an ingrown toenail just before the proceedings—exacerbated by playing 18 games in a 7-on-7 tournament the two previous days—so he could take part.
“It was different from any other camp we'd been to,” Michael says. “Most of them are all the same. This one was edgy and fun. It was all the top guys, and the format and the music and the energy took it over the top.”
Switzer the elder was back in Kenan Stadium again Saturday night, this time taking photos in his job as a freelance photographer. The sky around Kenan Stadium about 8:30 was a hash of foreboding clouds in one direction and pink sunlight through the clouds to the west. The frenzy of music and whistles and collisions of some 60 thoroughbred athletes was just as it has been through three previous Freak Shows.
“They've taken it up a notch,” Switzer says. “The format brought out Ryan's drive and competitiveness three years ago. It's doing the same thing but even to a greater degree with these kids.”
It's a veritable carnival of football, the only things lacking being the clowns and cotton candy. This year Luke produced two week's worth of promo videos, most of them built around historical clips of Tar Heel greats through the decades and all accented with creepy music clips and anything new he found searching iTunes with the words “Freak Show.” Luke knew the theme was working when his ominous and spooky play list of funereal organ music he was piping through the stadium at midday of the 2014 Freak Show had Fedora calling him in and saying, “Chris, that stuff's freaking me out. Can we at least turn it off until 5 o'clock?”
“Most of the year, our work has to be polished and professional looking,” Luke says. “This is our Halloween. This is the time of year we can break out and do something really different.”
The high school players, many with their coaches and parents, begin arriving late Saturday afternoon, spooky organ music clips already reverberating through Kenan Stadium. A thunderstorm skirted the campus early evening, lending more of a foreboding aura with atmospheric crackles popping and gloomy clouds hovering.
Fedora assembled the players in the Swofford Auditorium on the second floor of Kenan Stadium shortly after 7 p.m. and introduced them to eight Tar Heels of recent vintage now on NFL rosters who'd be helping coach that night—Jabari Price, Tre Boston, Sly Williams, Jonathan Cooper, Travis Bond, Bryn Renner, Kareem Martin and Kevin Reddick.
“All these guys are living the dream that you have right now,” Fedora told the recruits, nodding toward the Tar Heel alumni. “Tonight, don't waste the opportunity of them being here. Pick their brains, find out how they got to where they are. What's it going to take for you to get there? How hard do you need to work to get where they are?”
From there they moved to the weight room for 30 minutes of spirited bench presses amid sauna-like temperatures and the amped up sounds of Eddie Van Halen and Metallica. College Football Hall of Famer Dre Bly drew raucous and throaty applause for pounding out more than a dozen benches, and Bly was sweaty and stoked as the group moved to the field by 8:15 and began loosening up. A dozen or so members of the Carolina women's volleyball and track and field teams had been recruited for the evening to help register players and handle odds-and-ends operational tasks, and pole vault specialist Rayna Yvars was engulfed in the spirit from the weight room.
“If I played football, I would have said, 'Where do I sign?'” she said.
Current Tar Heels were actively involved on the playing field in helping manage the flow of footballs and kibitz with the recruits between reps. During stretching, receiver Bug Howard dogged the defensive backs, saying they'd be grabbing “nothing but air” all night, and cornerback Malik Simmons retaliated by hounding the line of receivers prospects.
“This is a great atmosphere,” Simmons said. “It makes you compete. You have NFL players out here, players on the team already, coaches you want to impress, and of course you want to win your reps.”
“I can remember being so psyched, my blood pumping so hard,” freshman offensive tackle William Sweet added of his Freak Show experience last year. “The music and the environment and the energy are so much fun.”
That theme was underlined no more so than during the dodgeball competition around 10 p.m. On the field were two concurrent games with players on opposite teams arrayed 15 to 20 yards apart, hurling eight-inch rubber balls at one another. If you did a visual panorama of the players, coaches, parents and assorted onlookers standing to the side, mostly what you saw was a smile on every face.
“I think it's important for these young guys to understand, you can have fun working hard,” Fedora says. “When working hard can become your passion, you can do anything.”
Chapel Hill writer Lee Pace (leepace7@gmail.com) is beginning his 26th year writing “Extra Points” and 12th reporting from the sidelines for the Tar Heel Sports Network. His unique look at Tar Heel football appears regularly throughout the year. Follow him on Twitter @LeePaceTweet.
Players Mentioned
