Lucas: Back Home

By Adam Lucas

Welcome back.

Carolina clinched a return trip to the College World Series on Saturday night. This is a team for which it's easy to root. Likable players, likable coaching staff, a knack for big moments.

But this win is perhaps most important for the overall program and the reestablishment of Carolina's place on the national stage.

It doesn't seem possible, but the Tar Heels have only played three games in Omaha since 2013. To get them back there was both a monumental undertaking and also reminds another generation of college baseball that Carolina belongs there. As the Mike Fox era churned out CWS appearance after CWS appearance, the program began using the slogan: "Omaha: Where the Tar Heels play." Because they did, almost every single year.

We knew about Zesto and the zoo and the Drover. We watched the thunderstorms roll in at Rosenblatt and we understood the beach balls in the outfield ("Left field sucks! Right field sucks!") and we saw former President George W. Bush walk through the Carolina dugout to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at what was then known as TD Ameritrade Park.

So much of what Carolina baseball became happened in Omaha. Robert Woodard on Father's Day. Tim Federowicz homering in the rain. Dustin Ackley becoming the College World Series' all-time leader in hits. The relationship with JR Anton, which began on a dusty back field and came to define what the program wanted to be off the field.

All of it was great. But some programs make a great run with one head coach and then can't duplicate it. Now no one can say that about Carolina, because Scott Forbes is in his fourth year as head coach and this is indisputably his program. He fits as perfectly as Fox once did. On Friday afternoon, while everyone else was hunting for tickets or lining up for a standing room spot or fretting about lineups, Forbes took the opportunity a few hours before first pitch of the super-regional to walk around campus, just to soak it in and clear his mind.

It is not easy to be a college head coach right now. Recruiting is changing and the transfer portal is demanding. Forbes has figured out how to assemble a team the way that works for him. He's still hauling in the key North Carolina prospects—of the starting lineup, Vance Honeycutt, Gavin Gallaher, Colby Wilkerson and Luke Stevenson are Tar Heel natives—but he's supplementing them with the right transfers.

Friday night super-regional starter Shea Sprague played in the Cape Cod League and thought his strong performances would speak for themselves. He found out that Carolina does things differently.

"One thing I really appreciated about Coach Forbes is that when he called me, he said he wanted to get me down to Chapel Hill on a visit," Sprague said recently on the Carolina Insider podcast. "He said he wanted to meet me before he gave me an offer. A lot of schools in the portal are trying to rush you. But Carolina wanted to meet me and see what I was about."

Which is how Forbes and his staff assembled a team that is primarily about one thing: winning. Other than Honeycutt, who had one of the most dynamic single-game postseason performances in UNC history Saturday night in the clinching victory, this is not necessarily a team of stars. But it also might be Carolina's best overall team since that 2013 group. Everyone has done something during this postseason run. Matt Poston was knocked around in the regional but then pivotal in Friday's super-regional victory. Captain Jackson Van De Brake lost his starting job to Gallaher but scored the winning run that eliminated LSU, a regional in which Gallaher won Most Outstanding Player honors. The Tar Heels lost two Friday night starters to injury, Jake Knapp and Folger Boaz, but pitching coach Bryant Gaines pieced together a staff that ranks in the top 15 nationally in team ERA.

This just feels like a team that needs to experience the College World Series. It doesn't seem right that Honeycutt—whose father, Bobby, was on Carolina's 1989 World Series team—would end his Carolina career without playing at least two games in Omaha. There was a time when every four-year class of Tar Heels took it as a birthright to play in the College World Series. This year is a step towards returning to that outlook.

It's difficult not to be spoiled when the numbers look like this: 2024 marks the eighth time in the last 18 non-COVID seasons that the Tar Heels have advanced to the College World Series. The other in-state ACC baseball teams have been nine times in a combined 228 seasons.

No wonder that the history plus this team's incredible flair for the dramatic means they are rapidly converting new Tar Heel baseball fans. Thanks to Chad Flack's heroics against Alabama that earned the 2006 CWS appearance, Boshamer Stadium was renovated after the 2007 campaign. Since that renovation through the start of this season, the Heels had 32 postseason victories in Chapel Hill, with three of them a walk-off win.

This postseason alone, Boshamer Stadium has seen three walk-off victories, all three of which came with Carolina trailing going into the ninth inning. If you feel like there's been a decade's worth of excitement packed into this NCAA Tournament, you're correct.

And it's just starting. Wait until next weekend, when every pitch feels fraught with either danger or exhilaration. This has been a great reminder of how fun it can be when you get a couple extra weeks—do we dare get greedy and ask for even a couple more weeks—of Tar Heel sports.

Honeycutt grew up coming to Carolina games and idolizing Tar Heel players in a variety of sports (football receiver Hakeem Nicks was a special favorite). "I thought the players were superheroes," he says.

Vance, wait until you find out what kids in 2024 think about you. Those kids, and the crowds they helped make up, are a big part of this story. Tar Heel fans sold out Boshamer Stadium and and set a stadium attendance record on Saturday night and overflowed the hill beyond the fence and turned the field hockey stadium into a tailgate party. Carolina baseball in June was a Chapel Hill event.

The absence from Omaha did provide some needed perspective. How insane was it that for the better part of a decade, we just assumed the season would end on the sport's biggest stage? What we didn't appreciate when Carolina was making six trips to the College World Series in eight seasons is this: it's incredibly difficult to make it. The mid-2000s were an unusual time—UNC baseball fans went from "we're never going to make it past South Carolina" to "of course we will go to Omaha." Eventually, you just assumed they would make it and were surprised when they didn't in 2010 and 2012. What do people do in the month of June if they don't go to Omaha?

This year, we don't have to find out. We're going to get a whiskey filet and drink a milkshake and hang out in the Old Market. We're going to play baseball in front of 24,000 fans and we're going to play in the biggest games many of these players will ever see and we're going to have innings we'll remember forever.

We're going, in other words, back home.

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University of North Carolina Athletics

Players Mentioned

Folger Boaz

Gavin Gallaher

Vance Honeycutt

Jake Knapp

Matt Poston

Shea Sprague

Luke Stevenson

Jackson Van De Brake

Colby Wilkerson

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