A wedding, and a Duke-UNC Final Four, sets up a day this NC couple will never forget
Wait, he remembers texting his fiancée, could this really happen?
On a Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago, a group of six UNC alumni and diehard basketball fans sat in the living room of an AirBnB in Nashville, emotionally drained, staring at a TV. They were on a bachelor party trip that five of them — all besides the one surprised, Ryan Kendall — had been planning for weeks. But no one could’ve planned this: The 8-seeded North Carolina basketball team had built and lost a 25-point lead yet somehow still escaped with a second-round NCAA tournament overtime win over top-seeded Baylor.
Kendall was texting his fiancée, Kegan Cox, throughout the game. It’s a well-worn custom between them. But these texts weren’t just about Caleb Love’s shot selection, or Armando Bacot’s defense.
Specifically, Kendall remembers doing the calculus on what would need to happen for UNC to still be playing on April 2.
April 2 was an important day, after all. It still is.
It’s when Kendall and Cox are getting married.
“That was one of the most stressful games I’ve ever watched in my life,” Kendall told The News & Observer on Wednesday, still laughing in disbelief about that day in Nashville. “But that’s also when I was like, ‘Holy crap, we actually might make a run.’”
The Tar Heels’ run through the NCAA tournament has meant a lot of things to a lot of different people. Saturday night’s Final Four matchup between Duke and North Carolina, somehow, means more to even more people.
What it means to first-year head coach Hubert Davis has been well-documented. Same goes for the Tar Heels who’ll play on Saturday. The same is true, even, for those at Duke: UNC’s run has given the Blue Devils a shot to wash away their season’s biggest blemish — to claim a rivalry edge that once felt long-gone after their loss on coach Mike Krzyzewski’s home finale.
There are plenty of layers to what this game means to Kendall, 25, and Cox, 24. But in the context of their wedding day, the Tar Heel grads and Charlotte residents are excited to bring all their friends together under one roof for the ultimate game — even with it being on their ultimate day.
“I get that the wedding is a celebration of Ryan and Kegan,” Kendall said. “But I really look at it like a celebration of all the people who are in our lives.”
Cox agreed.
“At first, the game being on our wedding day was a little bit anxiety-inducing. But in a really weird way, I kind of like it now,” she said. “UNC gave me everything. And now that’s coming full circle, where we’ll get to celebrate not just our relationship but the fact that we’re all friends and (UNC) alumni. We can celebrate that tie that we have literally forever.”
Kendall, the head of business development at a tech startup, and Cox, a senior research associate at Atrium Health CMC Main, met as students in Chapel Hill in the fall of 2016. They met-cute a few times. The most memorable one was at an off-campus party when Kendall and Cox realized they had the same taste in music — smooth indy rock bands and instrumentalists, like Glass Animals, Day Wave and Tycho.
Cox remembers Kendall, with his don’t-sweat-it confidence, unironically asking her, “You want to listen to my Spotify playlist? I have 11 followers.”
Their first date was ice cream and walking around Chapel Hill’s campus. Another early date was at the Ackland Art Museum, when Kendall flashed the limited knowledge he gleaned from an introductory art history course. They soon-after started dating for the long-term and never really stopped six years after that.
“I remember I was a freshman in college, I’d just gotten to Chapel Hill, first time having to move away from my parents,” Cox said, “and I remember my Mom being like, ‘You just met someone? Really?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah. This is it.’”
Along the way, they learned about each other.
While Cox had always been a motivated student at Wilmington’s E.A. Laney High — the same high school Tar Heel legend Michael Jordan went to — Kendall grew into an academic. He’s a first-generation college student, the son of a U.S. Marine and a mortgage salesperson, and spent his first 12 years in Massachusetts and next five in Florida before moving to North Carolina for his last year of high school. He graduated from Olympic High in Charlotte in 2015 — not sure “what I was going to do with my life” or “what college could be for me.”
All that helps explain why The Day and The Game colliding has made both more special to them.
“Roy Williams? Like, who is Roy Williams?” Kendall said. “That was me, my first year in college, you know? I wasn’t from North Carolina. I didn’t know much about UNC besides the business school. And now we’re a part of this. It goes beyond us and our group.”
April 2, it turns out, isn’t an uncommon day to get married. Not even for UNC fans. Yahoo Sports! published a story earlier this week of how several UNC- and Duke-loving couples, one of whom is from the Triangle, is figuring out how their wedding days could coexist with one of the biggest games in college basketball history. (“By the time it starts, the ceremony, speeches and toasts will be over,” one groom said in the story. “After that, man, we’re going to be drinking beer, dancing and hopefully watching us win.”)
The game has thrown a few curveballs in Kendall and Cox’s plans. One guest of the wedding, a former coworker of Cox’s at Carolina Coffee Shop on Franklin Street, won’t be able to attend the wedding because of an understandably expected need at work. Tipoff is planned for a few minutes right around the time the reception ends, so that’s good, but Kendall is still working to find a place so all of his guests could watch the UNC-Duke game on the same screen.
But that’s where their worries end, they said.
“Once Ryan found out it was the 8:50 p.m. game, and our wedding ends at 9, it’s kind of something that can work out really well,” Cox said. “We’ll have so many people together. We can celebrate together. And then, we can go do something we’ve done the past four years.”
“We’re not driving off into the sunset alone,” Kendall said. “We’re going to watch UNC and Duke.”
Cox then smiled and shrugged.
“We’re UNC fans,” she said. “That’s what we do.”
This story was originally published March 31, 2022 at 11:23 AM.
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