Fox has put UNC-CH back on top in baseball

CHAPEL HILL -- In the days before his baseball team left for the College World Series in Omaha, Neb., UNC-Chapel Hill head coach Mike Fox absorbed a rush of media attention typically experienced by big-name football and basketball coaches.

"I'm uncomfortable with it, for one," Fox said, sounding like a man who's being very careful what he wishes for.

Too late for that. Ten seasons into his UNC tenure, he has brought the program to a level of unprecedented success that strikes him as a bit unsettling. With every reminder of Carolina baseball's growth, he quickly recalls simpler pleasures and pains.

"First of all, I love practice. I like practices better than I like games," Fox said when asked to describe the coaching style with which he has guided the Tar Heels back to the college game's biggest stage for the third straight year. The Tar Heels will open series play tonight at 7 against Louisiana State.

"I relish that pressure," Fox said. "I like the competition, but probably not as much as I like just the solitude of a good practice, being out there hitting fungoes, throwing batting practice. It's the fastest three or four hours of your life."

But Fox can't escape that he has made Carolina baseball a bigger deal. In the six academic years before this one, both the annual cost of fielding the baseball team and the gap between expenses and revenue have more than doubled, according to figures provided by the athletic department. (Fox and Dick Baddour, the athletic director, say it's unrealistic to expect UNC baseball to break even or better.)

The latest indication of how seriously the university is taking baseball: a $25.5 million expansion project at Boshamer Stadium, an effort fueled in part by the fund-raising bump that followed the 2006 Series.

"I hear $25 million, and I can remember my first year at [N.C.] Wesleyan, and I was just trying to put a septic tank behind home plate so we could have a bathroom there," Fox said.

To the head coach, 52, it would be "extremely dangerous" to let this new, well-heeled reality affect how he sees himself.

"I mean, I'm just a college baseball coach," he said. "I'm not ... I just think you've got to be careful about putting you or your program up there on a level where they don't belong.

"I'm as concerned about why we're spending $25 million on a 4,000-seat baseball stadium -- not 'concerned,' but if you look at it, I mean, it doesn't make sense. It really doesn't. I'm glad we're doing it, but it's not something I came in here and demanded."

A program in decline

Back then, North Carolina and Mike Fox were just happy to find one another again.

The idea of coaching had taken hold of Fox at the 1978 College World Series, when the former walk-on made the all-tournament team as UNC's starting second baseman. (Southern Cal won the championship.)

"I really felt, 'Wow, this is pretty cool, I'd like to maybe do that again,' and I knew the only way I was going to do it again was to coach," said Fox, the son of a sports-loving General Electric employee who helped him learn the game.

Aside from a summertime stint with the then-independent Birmingham (Ala.) Barons, "kind of a ragtag thing," Mike Fox knew he wasn't going to play professionally. "I wasn't very good," he said.

Two years at Millbrook High School in Raleigh as a coach and teacher convinced him that high school wasn't for him, and if not for the persistent urge to coach, he might have kept repossessing cars as a way up the GMAC ladder.

The opportunity to get back on the field came in 1983 at N.C. Wesleyan, where he built a Division III power and later served as athletic director. When he read about the Carolina job opening, he and his wife, Cheryl, looked at each other, "and I just kind of had this feeling in my stomach that maybe this is what was meant to be."