April 7, 2004

by Adam Lucas
Tar Heel Monthly

The last remnant of the basketball season-the bald head-is gone. Jesse Holley is back to being a football player, and he's got the hair to prove it.

Holley caught 12 passes, two of them for touchdowns, during his freshman campaign last season. But while his fellow freshman receivers were going through offseason conditioning, he was spending his time across campus at the Smith Center, where he served as a walk-on guard for Roy Williams's first Carolina basketball squad. Holley missed a significant portion of the early-season hoops practices while wrapping up the 2003 football season, but eventually earned spot minutes late in the season as an energy-boosting defensive substitution.

"He's extremely competitive," head coach John Bunting says. "What you saw on the basketball court, that's what he does on the football field. He's not only talented, but he's very competitive, and that's what makes him special."

His trip to Denver with the hardwood Heels-when the squad shaved their heads as a symbol of team unity-forced him to miss the first week of spring football workouts and also caused him some timing issues once he returned to the gridiron.

"I must have been used to catching a basketball," Holley says. "I was bobbling the ball a lot those first few days. Now I'm catching them and tucking them away."

The rising sophomore from Roselle, NJ, didn't develop any cases of shyness while away from the football team. One of the most talkative players on the roster of either squad, Holley stepped right back into his role as the most loquacious of the wide receivers-a title he almost wins by default since Mike Mason, his only competition for the title, has to talk through a broken jaw.

Holley is fond of telling both his teammates and opposing cornerbacks, "All I do is catch touchdown passes," and he hopes to expand on that reputation in 2004.

"I'm much more comfortable now," he says. "I'm comfortable like one of those old house shoes you can just slide your foot into. I understand the coverages now, how to work a defender and take advantage of how the DB's are playing me. After being here for a year, you know the play call when you hear it the first time. You don't have to second-guess yourself. I'm one hundred percent more comfortable than I was last year."

His task, then, is to prove that comfort level to senior quarterback Darian Durant. With Bobby Blizzard a frequent injury casualty last season, Durant never really found the one go-to receiver he'd had in 2002 with Sam Aiken.

Odds are he'll find someone to fill that role among 2004's deep, talented crop of receivers. Mason has missed extensive time with his jaw injury, but Adarius Bowman has quietly had a very productive spring.

"Last year, we messed a lot of stuff up, but our athleticism pulled us through," Holley says. "Now that we have a year under our belts with Darian, we can be more efficient. Mike is a flat out speedster. He's gifted with speed like no other. Out of all of us, I think Adarius is the most improved. He was very stiff last year, but he's shifty now. He's putting it together with finesse and power. And myself, I think I'm a mixture of everybody. I think I can be that go-to guy.

"It's kind of like pick your poison. If you double somebody, another guy is going to go off."

To make sure he didn't fall off the depth chart at the very competitive position, Holley worked out during football season with an eye towards football. Hoops strength coach Thomas McKinney designed a workout program for him that included elements designed to ease his transition from sport to sport.

The Tar Heels will wrap up spring practice on Wednesday evening, but Holley doesn't plan to take any more time off from football. He believes the offseason conditioning in the summer will be intensely competitive among the wide receivers.

"I think receiver is the deepest position on this team," he says. "We're all young. It's going to be fun in the summertime, because we're all going to be going at it. Everybody wants to play, and we know that to win games we've got to put the best two or three guys out there on the field. That keeps you sharp. It keeps you wanting to run your routes crisply and learn the playbook."