University of North Carolina Athletics
Extra Points: A Visit With Gene Chizik
July 26, 2015 | Football, Featured Writers
Gene Chizik is six months into his new job as defensive coordinator for the Tar Heel football team, having been hired by head coach Larry Fedora in January after two seasons out of football. He's been through Blue Dawn, spring practice, spring recruiting and the June camp season. Now on the cusp of the opening of training camp, Chizik ruminates on a variety of subjects with Lee Pace.
It's good to be back in the game. I feel good about returning to coaching and doing so at the University of North Carolina. Working with Larry has been fantastic. There's not been anything that's made me look back and go, “Wow, what did I do?” The players have been great. I love the assistant coaches. That's what a job is all about. What is the quality of the job every single day? If you have great guys you work with and you have a great boss and the kids you work with have a high care factor and want to be good, it's fun coming to work. I understand the bullets haven't started flying yet. That's fine. I understand that part. Up to this point, I have been extremely happy. This has been a great experience after taking two years off and coming back into an environment that's fun to be at.
Of course, I miss my family back in Auburn. That's been a challenge. I'm not going to say it's been easy. But we've certainly made it work. My wife, two daughters and son coming up here and me going back there has been somewhat seamless, as easy as it can be for that far a commute. It's been as good as it can be, but still difficult. Since I can't get home during the fall, they'll come up quite a bit. They're 'all-in' to the Carolina scene. They've got stickers on their cars and t-shirts and everything. I've wanted to get my son Cally up for parts of football camp, but he had football and baseball practice and weren't able to do as much as we'd like.
We have great staff chemistry. I love these guys, it's fantastic. First of all, they're extremely hard workers. They're extremely smart when it comes to football IQ, how to coach and teach, and they're great with the kids. In any competitive sport, you have to have coaches who are great teachers, and they also have to have great relationships with their players. Everything isn't going to be Shangri-La every day. You have to be able to weather the ups and downs with players and situations because you have those relationships. Our staff chemistry and the whole staff in general is as good as I've been around in 28 years. It's fantastic. It's fun to come to work when you have guys like that. It's genuine, this is not politically-correct-speak, this is real.
Tray Scott was a great final piece to the puzzle in our meeting room. (Ole Miss coach) Hugh Freeze and I talked in depth about him. He worked for Hugh at Arkansas State and Ole Miss. Hugh recommended him highly. His knowledge of the game for a 31-year-old is really different than most guys his age. His ability and his commitment to being a great coach is very evident. He's a worker. He's here at 11 every night making calls, looking at tape, making teach-tapes. He's a football rat, a football office rat. He brings a nice element of youth, not just for recruiting but for connecting with the players on our team. He is young enough to tell them, “I understand what you're dealing with, it's not been that long ago for me, I get it.” But he can still draw the line of accountability. He can tell them, “This is not a request. It's a mandate. Anything otherwise is not an option.” He's a rising star in the coaching world.
Larry is everything I thought he'd be. He's an extremely hard worker all the way around. He's always upbeat. He's one of those head coaches, when he walks into a staff room he generates a vibe of, “Here's another great day, let's get after it today.” Always the energy is there, there's never a down moment. He's extremely demanding. He can be and should be as that's the way he is himself in terms of hard work, attention to detail. On top of that, he has a great way of being the boss, and this is a hard thing to do. He can be the boss but also relate to and be a peer with the other coaches. Everyone knows the line. That's hard for some head coaches to do. He cares about his assistants, that's very evident. He's the boss and we all respect that.
A couple things have really impressed me about the Carolina experience. It has struck me what a great sell the academic part of Carolina is to our student-athletes. It's huge. I had always heard that Carolina academically is very impressive. I had no idea until I came here the magnitude of the different people who have come through here. That's No. 1. The second thing that became very evident to me is the family nature of the people who went to school here. The commitment to and love for the university is extraordinary. You can't talk to anyone who went to school here who would say, “It was okay, I might do it again.” A hundred percent say, “I would do that again tomorrow.” The networking once you graduate from this institution and go on is a great selling point for us. When a guy is done playing here and needs to go into the business world and get a job, there is a great family and network out there.
The negative stuff out there? It's polar opposite to the reality. I'm a set of eyes coming in absolutely foreign to anything that went on before, other than reading something or seeing a ticker on ESPN. There has been a tainted perception because of some things that happened years ago. But that perception is the polar opposite of what really is. Unfortunately, we've had to deal with some negative publicity. Those perceptions are absolutely and completely wrong in terms of the reality once you get here.
I know people are asking, “What difference can Gene Chizik make?” It won't be Gene Chizik by himself, I can promise you that. But our new staff as a whole, I think we can make a great impact. I don't have any doubt about that. We will make a difference in a positive way. Does that mean we're going to win every game? No. It means you're going to see progress. As the season goes on, we'll get better. At what rate, I don't know. We're still working on that.
Two words we use a lot are relentless and selflessness. Every day you have to work toward getting better. One thing I have seen is our guys have attacked the summer workouts relentlessly. They have done a great job of coaching themselves and being their own captains out there. I think that kind of plays into the word relentlessness. They have all tried to be relentless to achieve a much bigger goal. Every day we work on selflessness—me and you and everyone. I want the guy who does not worry about what he gets. I want the guy who worries about, “Did I do my job so I did not let down the other 10?” It's not a matter of making a big play and saying, “Look at me.” It's a matter of doing your job and not letting your teammates down. That's how the military does it. That's how you do it in battle. I don't want to imply that a football game is as important as what our servicemen have done, but the analogy would be similar. That's what we're trying to get to, but we're not there yet.
The “Choo Choo” Justice statue out front is pretty special to me. My dad grew up in Asheville, and his best friend was Bill Justice, Charlie's older brother. They go back to childhood. They played high school ball together, went to Rollins College together and played football there, then went off to war together. Bill fought in Saipan, my dad at Okinawa. Then they came back, finished college together, and later Bill was coaching and teaching in Clearwater, and he talked my dad into moving there. My dad passed away in 2002, but I've gone back and visited with Bill. My dad won a Bronze Star, but he never talked about it, so I asked Bill about my dad. I asked him the things I wished I'd asked my dad when he was still alive. I think about that every day when I walk in the building. Pretty incredible, huh? It's the circle of life. You never know where life is going to take you.
