Mike Fox walks away from the UNC baseball powerhouse he built
There were a million memorable moments in Mike Fox’s long and glorious career coaching baseball at his alma mater. Fox built a national powerhouse at North Carolina, churned out first-round draft picks, made six trips to Omaha and came within a play or two of a national title in the final game of the 2006 College World Series.
After all that time, one stands out: On a sunny June afternoon in 2018, in a Boshamer Stadium that looked nothing like it had when Fox arrived two decades earlier, moments after North Carolina defeated Stetson to go back to Omaha for a seventh time. That win ended a five-year drought at UNC, a period when injuries and bad draft luck conspired to depress the program far, far below the lofty standards Fox had established.
Amid the celebration, Fox, in front of the home dugout, lifted his wife Cheryl into the air and twirled her around in a moment of pure and exuberant joy.
“We’re going back to Omaha, baby,” Fox yelled, very much in the spirit of a coach who had never been, not one who could almost claim Nebraska residency at one point.
“You’re with a different group of kids. You’re trying to see their joy,” Fox said. “You immediately turn to those kids. At that time, at ‘18, that was pretty much all of them because we hadn’t been since ‘13. It’s just the fact those kids were going to experience it. That’s the joy of coaching. Certainly we were all excited going back. To see those kids, they’d heard about it, but now they were going to experience something that was going to last them a lifetime.”
It was also a measure of how much Fox loved being the baseball coach at North Carolina, and it was entirely genuine. There was never anything fake about Fox. He was who he was, whether it was publicly agonizing about his team’s struggles — he never shied away from speaking frankly in the (rare) bad times — or occasionally pushing his pitchers to their physical limits, which was really the one criticism that could be legitimately leveled at him.
“What he’s done for the North Carolina baseball program is equivalent to what coach (Dean) Smith did for our basketball program,” North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams said Friday. “I really believe that. He’s just so good, such a great representative of the university. He was a student-athlete here and he coached here, and he’ll bleed North Carolina blue for the rest of his life, just like he has since Day 1.”
There are few bigger fans of UNC baseball than Williams, who would commute back and forth to Omaha for College World Series games when he had obligations on campus. The basketball coach has spent many a spring afternoon in Boshamer’s upper deck, sitting down the first-base line so he could observe the home dugout. His love of UNC baseball certainly played a role in the $600,000 donation Williams and his wife Wanda made to help cover the scholarships of returning spring-sports seniors who lost this year of competition.
“I’ve lived and died with him,” Williams said, “because I love the sport and I love what Mike Fox has done with our program.”
Like Williams, Fox went to North Carolina (where he played junior varsity basketball for Eddie Fogler) and returned to his alma mater after success elsewhere — a Division III title at NC Wesleyan — to usher in an era of sustained excellence in his sport.
There was only one thing missing from Fox’s resume, and North Carolina was two innings away in the national title game in 2006, giving up the winning run in the third and final game of the championship series against Oregon State on a throwing error. A year later, the Tar Heels made it back to the title series for a rematch with the Beavers, but were swept.
He had a knack for recruiting the kind of talent that was good enough to go in the first round of the draft but wouldn’t be swayed by first-round money out of high school, and the Tar Heels built a pipeline of players who went straight to the major leagues after their junior seasons, pitchers and corner infielders especially.
And Fox did it in a way that commanded respect, even from his fiercest rivals.
“It’s a little bit sad for me,” N.C. State coach Elliott Avent said. “ I think Mike Fox is everything college baseball should be about and college athletics should be about. He loves Carolina, he bleeds Carolina blue. He’s devoted a huge part of his life to UNC and the success of their athletic department and baseball in particular.”
There was a period when State-Carolina became as heated and as high-level a rivalry as there was in college baseball, the Wolfpack catching but never quite surpassing the Tar Heels. They both made the College World Series in 2013, facing each other in the opening game in what felt like Triangle baseball Armageddon. N.C. State won that one, but North Carolina returned the favor to eliminate the Wolfpack.
Somehow, playing for a national title still paled in comparison to their 18-inning ACC tournament marathon in Durham that year, played in front of the largest crowd ever to see a college baseball game in North Carolina. Landon Lassiter scored the winning run for the Tar Heels at 1:51 a.m. (North Carolina, under Fox, almost made a habit of winning games in the wee hours.)
As Fox said Friday, the rising tide of college baseball in the Triangle lifted both boats.
“We have had some epic, epic battles,” Avent said. “It’s State vs. Carolina so sometimes it’s almost like you’re not supposed to get along or forge a friendship. But the friendship we have forged over the last three or four years has not only been very enjoyable, it’s deepened as every month goes by.”
The transition to Scott Forbes, for 20 years Fox’s consigiliere in the dugout, should be a smooth one. The program weathered the recent departure of key assistants like Scott Jackson and Robert Woodard — and Chad Holbrook before that — and Forbes will have a running start as he tries to maintain the momentum Fox built, as much as anyone can amid a pandemic that already wiped out one college baseball season and could very well wipe out another.
That absence of baseball is what led Fox down the road to retirement. After 22 years as the head coach at North Carolina, he got a taste of life after baseball, with his kids and grandkids, and decided he liked it better.
“I got to experience life without it, practice retirement if you will,” Fox said. “And found that I enjoyed it.”
He decided he won’t miss it. North Carolina will definitely miss him.
This story was originally published August 7, 2020 at 3:26 PM with the headline "Mike Fox walks away from the UNC baseball powerhouse he built."
