Carolina Kickoff Report
Chapel Hill, NC.
Carolina Kickoff
Jan 27-28 2024
TL;DR? We came, We saw, and we stole some lunch money. But we want more.
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| Thursday Night Lights |
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| Thanks for not calling us chumps this year Ultiworld |
With Carolina Kickoff on the horizon, the guys expressed a mix of confidence in their work, and butterflies about the competition, which is the secret sauce coaches love. And overall, I think we walked away from it with the feeling that we grew as a team all weekend, showed that we can compete with anyone, and took away concrete, actionable 'things' to work on.
After some exciting Scheduling negotiations, we rolled into the Holiday Inn Express without much excitement on the road. Breakfast was 'hotel fine' aka, pretty bad, but at least we had food in the stomach. Little coach note on the cultural shift going on - not only was I not first to breakfast, but almost the entire team was done eating 2 hours before kickoff, and just chilling. We were on the move, and booted and suited by game minus 1:15 for our first round against NC State. In recent years games with now perennial national attender NCST have not been close. And this year started out poorly as we dug ourselves quite a hole. Struggling offensively with early season connectivity, and defensively with containing their resets and goal line sets, we fell into a 3 goal hole. In the second half, we found our footing, and battled back to tie 12 all before falling 14-12. As would be a hallmark of our team all weekend, every single player on our team got on the field, and contributed in some way, as we work to balance game outcomes, and player development.
Our second game saw us facing off against D3 powerhouse Davidson. We played solidly - the O-line was unbroken (even if it took some 'dirty' holds, Our d-lines broke 50% of the time; And ALL our lines converted on about 67% of possessions showing our depth. (Note: We don't do a tradtional 'Offense 1, Defense 1, Defense 2 - we play 10-12 guys on Offense, and every player on the team plays defense on one of 3 balanced lines that we call the smash brothers). Final score 15-7.
After a lunch bye, we faced off against Georgetown. Last year we needed all our firepower to secure a 2 point Saturday win (And a 4 point Sunday win). We came out strong rolling to a 4-0 lead, before we either regressed to the mean, or grew overconfident and allowed them to bring it back to within 1. After a clean hold to take half, words were shared, and ships righted, and we rolled to a 15-9 win. From this game we took a heightened sense that every O-line turn comes with a cost, and every d-line point is a gift to be treasured. We departed for first dinner. Per tradition, we hit cookout hard.
SUNDAY:
UNC Chapel Hill, 4 time defending champs had a Friday 15-6 game against Duke, then Played App State and the High School team on Saturday. I suspect that they were confident and rested going into the game. I think we scored 12 against them the previous season ... spread out over 2 games. While PSU didn't secure the win, we did take them to the wire, before losing 14-12 -- the most anyone would score against them at the tournament. And we went on to win out. A little deflated after the UNC game, we gave up a first point break vs Duke in the 5th place bracket, but eventually got our calories balanced, and our internal energy recharged and took the win with a somewhat sloppy 12-9 win. The 5th place finals was against our good friends from the Cape Fear river, UNCW. They kind of owned us last spring, but we closed out the tournament w/ a solid 14-8 win to take 5th.
Next up, QCTU.
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