Dec. 26, 2002

By Dave Lohse
Associate Athletic Communications Director

Some might consider the fall sports season recently completed at the University of North Carolina as less than stellar. By any historical standard, Carolina's that is in this case, that might be a fair judgment. But to use UNC's own past successes to evaluate the present is problematic to say the least. When you set the bar so high, it becomes harder and harder to make the leap.

The fall season also is an example of how fine the line has become in college athletics between winning and losing. Every sport on the collegiate level has become more competitive. Just ask the Tar Heels' women's soccer team, which has now gone two straight years without winning a national championship, the first time that has happened in its history.

Regardless of the sport, most everyone has some good players now. There are more good players out there for college coaches to recruit and at the high school and club level these players receive better coaching, better conditioning and better weight training than they ever had before. And more and more collegiate athletes are coming from outside the United States as college coaches now regularly search overseas to bring the best available talent in for their programs.

So while greater parity has been the rule in sports like football and basketball for a while, it now exists virtually everywhere on the college landscape as different schools win championships or reach Final Fours in sports as varied as golf, field hockey, swimming, soccer, track, you name it.

The fall sports season at UNC really captured a lot of the essence of the above trends. For instance, the Tar Heels' field hockey team failed to reach the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 20 years. Was Carolina a bad team? Hardly. Despite a 9-11 record UNC was ranked in the Top 12 in the country the entire season and beat Top 4 teams like Old Dominion and Maryland. But it seemed like the Tar Heels lost enough one-goal games to last a five-season span. The Tar Heels outshot Kent State 47-9 and Virginia 15-1 in two of their games but lost both. There's that fine line again. Switch those two results and UNC is in the NCAA Tournament and in a position to do some damage against a higher ranked team.

Now let's look at women's soccer. After the Tar Heels fell in the NCAA semifinals and failed to win a national title for the second straight year, UNC coach Anson Dorrance was peppered with questions as to whether the dynasty was over. He assured reporters that Carolina would again have a team in 2003 and he expected the Tar Heels to be very good again. After all, UNC has reached the Final Four 22 straight times--all 22 times there has been a tournament. And the program has lost only 25 games in 24 years. This is hardly a disaster but the fine line of winning and losing in an NCAA semifinal game against Santa Clara cost the Tar Heels despite the fact Carolina controlled the flow of play through most the match.

North Carolina's men's soccer team suffered a similar fate. After winning the national championship last season, UNC was eliminated in the second round of this year's tournament in double overtime at Penn State on a night when the temperature capped at 17 degrees. Of course if the Tar Heels had been a bit more fortunate in the regular season and won games against Davidson, Yale, Maryland and Clemson where they controlled the bulk of the play, the whole post-season would have been different. UNC would have been a higher seed and chances of playing in the frozen tundra of central Pennsylvania would never have happened. A fortuitous bounce here or there in a couple of those regular season games would have evolved into a completely different scenario. And remember, it was just a year ago that Coach Elmar Bolowich's team had to go to overtime three times in the NCAA Tournament just to get a chance to upset Indiana in the championship match.

These are all lessons that sports fans must learn. North Carolina has a great athletic program but it won't remain great if success is taken for granted. And sometimes the ball doesn't bounce your way and the results don't seem very fair. Unfortunately that is part of life as well.

You see there is a fine line between winning and losing. Just ask the Duke Blue Devils after they watched Dan Orner's game-ending 47-yard field goal somehow snake through the uprights in the Tar Heels' football season finale of 2002. That kick quintessentially defined that fine line.