“Viewpoints” is a place on Chapelboro where local people are encouraged to share their unique perspectives on issues affecting our community. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work, reporting or approval of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com. If you’d like to contribute a column on an issue you’re concerned about, interesting happenings around town, reflections on local life — or anything else — send a submission to viewpoints@wchl.com.
What Three Tar Heels Taught Me in Omaha
A perspective from Chris Ehrenfeld
Last week, when North Carolina beat West Virginia to advance to the College World Series finals for the first time since 2007, I made a decision in about ten minutes. I would fly to Omaha with my sons for Father’s Day weekend. In thirteen years of family travel, my sons and I had never once flown anywhere without their mom, and with the trip landing on Father’s Day, I knew it would be one we’d remember regardless of what happened on the field.
I expected to watch some good baseball with my boys. I didn’t expect to learn more about character from a group of twenty-year-olds than I’ve learned from most people three times their age.
Photo via Chris Ehrenfeld.
A Season on the Line, Twice
North Carolina hasn’t won a national championship in baseball in program history, not in nearly eighty years of the College World Series. This was the program’s thirteenth trip to Omaha and third trip to the finals. In the best-of-three championship series against Oklahoma, the Tar Heels lost Game 1 badly. The Sooners simply outhit UNC. That meant Game 2, on Father’s Day, was win-or-go-home.
UNC won that game 6-2, forcing a deciding Game 3 tonight. Whatever happens in that final game, three young men gave me a weekend I won’t forget, and a few lessons worth carrying home to Chapel Hill.
The Son Playing for a Father Who Isn’t There
UNC first baseman Erik Paulsen wears his father’s NYPD detective shield on a chain around his neck. His father, Erik Paulsen Sr., was a first responder in New York on September 11, 2001, spending days at ground zero digging through the wreckage alongside thousands of other officers and firefighters, most of them without proper respiratory protection. Years later, he was diagnosed with oropharyngeal cancer, a disease doctors have linked again and again to the toxic dust those first responders breathed in during the recovery effort. He died on July 4 of last year, just weeks before his son ever set foot on a UNC baseball field. He never got to see his son wear Carolina blue.
Before Sunday’s game, while my boys stood in a crowd of kids waiting for Erik to sign autographs, I noticed an older woman standing quietly behind all of them. I asked if she’d like help getting up front for a picture with him. She said she would, and added, “he’s my grandson.” When Erik looked up from signing a kid’s hat and saw his grandmother standing there, wanting a photo before the biggest game of his life, his whole face lit up.
A few hours later, that same young man would be standing alone in an empty dugout in tears. This past Sunday was Erik’s first Father’s Day without his dad alive to share it. Every father of every player on the UNC roster wore a button with Erik’s number on it that day, a quiet way of telling him he wasn’t carrying it alone. Erik didn’t know about the buttons until he saw one in the hotel lobby that morning. In a game his team needed to win simply to keep playing, he went three-for-five and scored a run, his best performance of the entire series. After the final out, while his teammates celebrated on the field, he stood there alone and told reporters afterward it was the first time he’d broken down in a while.
I think about that image: A son still finding a way to show up and perform at the highest level of his sport, carrying grief that never fully goes away, on the one day built to remind him of what he lost. That’s not a baseball story; that’s a life story that happened to take place on a baseball field.
The Walk-On Who Chose a Degree Over a Roster Spot
Right fielder Carter French wasn’t recruited to play baseball at UNC. The schools that wanted him for baseball weren’t academically where he wanted to be. So he chose Chapel Hill anyway and asked the coaching staff for a chance to walk on, with no scholarship and no guarantee. He earned a roster spot, then his first career start midway through his junior year, and by this season had become the team’s full-time starter in right field.
In Sunday’s must-win game, Carter made a highlight reel catch at the right field wall to save a potential home run, his second wall-saving catch in as many days, and reached base in all four of his plate appearances by drawing four walks, setting a new record for the most walks in a single game in College World Series finals history.
Carter is pre-med. He took his MCATs in the middle of this baseball season. He plans to attend medical school and is considering orthopedic surgery. My twin sons asked him to sign their hats “Dr. French.” He laughed, said it was the first time anyone had asked him that, and after signing the second hat, told them, “You have two of a kind.”
Photo via Chris Ehrenfeld.
Photo via Chris Ehrenfeld.
Carter chose education first and let baseball be the bonus, not the other way around. That’s a sequence most adults never quite get right.
The Kid Who Should Still Be in High School
Pitcher Caden Glauber is eighteen years old. He should be finishing his senior year of high school. Instead, he’s one of the most dominant arms in college baseball. Before both Saturday’s and Sunday’s games, he spent more time than anyone else on the team signing autographs and taking pictures with kids outside the stadium.
When UNC’s starting pitcher left Sunday’s game with an injury at the start of the fifth inning, with the season hanging on every pitch, Caden came in and threw five scoreless innings against one of the hottest lineups in the country. He shut the door completely. When the game ended and his teammates made their way to the locker room to continue to celebrate, Caden walked the other direction, out to right field, and spent the next fifteen minutes signing every autograph and taking every photo the kids in the stands asked for. My guess is he remembers being that kid himself, not all that long ago.
Photo via Chris Ehrenfeld.
Photo via Chris Ehrenfeld.
Just Three of Many
Erik, Carter, and Caden are the three stories I happened to collect that weekend, but they were far from the only ones. Over three days at the team hotel, at warm-ups, and around the ballpark, my boys and I had countless interactions with players up and down that roster, and every single one of them was kind and courteous. Not polite in the rushed, obligatory way athletes sometimes are with fans. Genuinely present. They stopped. They looked our boys in the eye. They asked questions back
In an era when college sports headlines are dominated by NIL deals and players treating programs like a stop on the way to the next paycheck, it was refreshing to spend a weekend around a team that didn’t carry any of that energy. These guys seemed grounded in something simpler: living in the moment they were in, and genuinely enjoying sharing it with the people around them, whether that was a teammate, a coach, or a kid asking for an autograph. You could tell they knew exactly how rare this stage was, and they weren’t going to let any of it pass by unnoticed.
What I’m Already Taking Home
I came to Omaha expecting good baseball. I’m leaving with something I didn’t expect: a reminder of what it looks like to show up fully for the moment in front of you, whatever that moment happens to be asking of you.
Watching these young men this weekend reminded me why I started writing my weekly newsletter, The BOLD Life, in the first place. The stories that stay with us are rarely about achievements alone. They’re about character, sacrifice, resilience, and the people we become along the way.
Erik showed up for his father’s memory on the hardest day of the calendar. Carter showed up for a future he planned years before anyone offered him a scholarship. Caden showed up for a kid in the stands who reminded him of himself not that many years ago.
Tonight, my boys and I will be in the stands at Charles Schwab Field, and I can tell you right now we are going to scream like our lungs depend on it. We would love nothing more than to watch this team pile on top of each other at the mound the way only a national championship lets you. There is a part of every Tar Heel fan in Chapel Hill tonight that wants this one badly.
But whether UNC wins or loses tonight, my sons and I already have what we came for.
We have a Father’s Day we’ll never forget. We have a trip we’ll talk about for years. And we have three examples of the kind of life worth aspiring to: a son honoring his father, a young man choosing substance over shortcuts, and an eighteen-year-old who understood that even in the biggest moment of his life, there was still time to make a kid’s day.
Coach Scott Forbes and his staff should be proud of every one of them.
Go Heels.
Chris Ehrenfeld is a Chapel Hill real estate entrepreneur and owner of WCHL/Chapelboro. He writes The BOLD Life, a weekly newsletter for people who want to be minor in money and major in life: www.bold-life.com
“Viewpoints” on Chapelboro is a recurring series of community-submitted opinion columns. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work or reporting of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com.
Viewpoints: What Three Tar Heels Taught Me in Omaha Chapelboro.com.
Hence then, the article about viewpoints what three tar heels taught me in omaha was published today ( ) and is available on chapelboro ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Viewpoints: What Three Tar Heels Taught Me in Omaha )
Also on site :
- Disney+ & A24 UK Teaming For First Time On Clem Garritty Comedy-Drama About Siblings Whose Father Is Accused Of Murder
- Germany plans to take 40% in Leopard tank maker KNDS, joining France as stakeholder
- As public sentiment sours, Indonesia awaits MSCI verdict which risks $13 billion in capital outflows