What Three Tar Heels Taught Me in Omaha

I went to watch baseball with my sons. I came home with a better answer to what money is actually for.

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Last week, North Carolina beat West Virginia to advance to the College World Series finals for the first time since 2007. I made a decision in about ten minutes. I would fly to Omaha with my sons for Father’s Day weekend.

It wasn’t a simple call. Last minute flights and hotel rooms aren’t cheap. My wife Jana isn’t a baseball fan, and her brother’s family was coming to town that same weekend, which meant the boys would miss time with their Czech cousins, and Jana would be hosting alone. But she’s heard me say it for years. Money is a tool, not a trophy. It exists to create moments you can’t get back. She told me to go. She said it would make for a great Father’s Day.

In thirteen years of family travel, my sons and I had never once flown anywhere without their mom. That alone made the trip feel different before we’d even left the ground. Add Father’s Day on top of it, and I knew this one would stay with us no matter what happened on the field.

I expected to watch some good baseball with my boys. I didn't expect to learn more about character from a group of twenty year olds than I've learned from most people three times their age.

A Season on the Line, Twice

North Carolina hasn’t won a national championship in baseball in program history, not in nearly eighty years of the College World Series. This was the program’s thirteenth trip to Omaha and third trip to the finals. In the best of three championship series against Oklahoma, the Tar Heels lost Game 1 badly. The Sooners simply out hit UNC. That meant Game 2, on Father’s Day, was win or go home.

UNC won that game 6-2, forcing a deciding Game 3 on Monday night. Three young men had already given me a weekend I wouldn’t forget, and a few lessons worth bringing home to you, whatever happened in that final game.

The Son Playing for a Father Who Isn’t There

UNC first baseman Erik Paulsen wears his father’s NYPD detective shield on a chain around his neck. His father, Erik Paulsen Sr., was a first responder in New York on September 11, 2001. He spent days at ground zero digging through the wreckage alongside thousands of other officers and firefighters, most of them without proper respiratory protection. Years later, he was diagnosed with oropharyngeal cancer, a disease doctors have linked again and again to the toxic dust those first responders breathed in during the recovery effort. He died on July 4 of last year, just weeks before his son ever set foot on a UNC baseball field. He never got to see his son wear Carolina blue. You can read the whole story on Erik’s dad here.

Before Sunday’s game, while my boys stood in a crowd of kids waiting for Erik to sign autographs, I noticed an older woman standing quietly behind all of them. I asked if she’d like help getting up front for a picture with him. She said she would and added, “he’s my grandson.” When Erik looked up from signing a kid’s hat and saw his grandmother standing there, wanting a photo before the biggest game of his life, his whole face lit up.

A few hours later, that same young man would be standing alone in an empty dugout in tears. This past Sunday was Erik’s first Father’s Day without his dad alive to share it. Every father of every player on the UNC roster wore a button with Erik’s number on it that day, a quiet way of telling him he wasn’t carrying it alone. Erik didn’t know about the buttons until he saw one in the hotel lobby that morning. In a game his team needed to win simply to keep playing, he went three-for-five and scored a run, his best performance of the entire series. After the final out, while his teammates celebrated on the field, he stood there alone and told reporters afterward it was the first time he’d broken down in a while.

I think about that image: A son still finding a way to show up and perform at the highest level of his sport, carrying grief that never fully goes away, on the one day built to remind him of what he lost. That’s not a baseball story. That’s a life story that happened to take place on a baseball field.

The Walk-On Who Chose a Degree Over a Roster Spot

Right fielder Carter French wasn’t recruited to play baseball at UNC. The schools that wanted him for baseball weren’t academically where he wanted to be. So he chose Chapel Hill anyway and asked the coaching staff for a chance to walk on, with no scholarship and no guarantee. He earned a roster spot, then his first career start midway through his junior year, and by this season had become the team’s full-time starter in right field.

In Sunday’s must-win game, Carter made a highlight reel catch at the right field wall to save a potential home run, his second wall-saving catch in as many days, and reached base in all four of his plate appearances by drawing four walks, setting a new record for the most walks in a single game in College World Series finals history.

Carter is pre-med. He took his MCATs in the middle of this baseball season. He plans to attend medical school and is considering orthopedic surgery. My sons asked him to sign their hats “Dr. French.” He laughed, said it was the first time anyone had asked him that, and after signing the second hat, told them, “You have two of a kind.”

Carter chose education first and let baseball be the bonus, not the other way around. That’s a sequence most adults never quite get right. We tell ourselves we’ll get serious about the meaningful thing once the urgent thing is handled. Carter built it the other way. The degree came first. The baseball was the gift on top.

The Kid Who Should Still Be in High School

Pitcher Caden Glauber is eighteen years old. He should be finishing his senior year of high school. Instead, he’s one of the most dominant arms in college baseball. Before both Saturday’s and Sunday’s games, he spent more time than anyone else on the team signing autographs and taking pictures with kids outside the stadium.

When UNC’s starting pitcher left Sunday’s game with an injury at the start of the fifth inning, with the season hanging on every pitch, Caden came in and threw five scoreless innings against one of the hottest lineups in the country. He shut the door completely. When the game ended and his teammates made their way to the locker room to continue to celebrate, Caden walked the other direction, out to right field, and spent the next fifteen minutes signing every autograph and taking every photo the kids in the stands asked for. My guess is he remembers being that kid himself, not all that long ago.

Just Three of Many

Erik, Carter, and Caden are the three stories I happened to collect that weekend, but they were far from the only ones. Over three days at the team hotel, at warm-ups, and around the ballpark, my boys and I had countless interactions with players up and down that roster, and every single one of them was kind and courteous. Not polite in the rushed, obligatory way athletes sometimes are with fans. Genuinely present. They stopped. They looked our boys in the eye. They asked questions back.

In an era when college sports headlines are dominated by NIL deals and players treating programs like a stop on the way to the next paycheck, it was refreshing to spend a weekend around a team that didn’t carry any of that energy. These guys seemed grounded in something simpler: living in the moment they were in, and genuinely enjoying sharing it with the people around them, whether that was a teammate, a coach, or a kid asking for an autograph. You could tell they knew exactly how rare this stage was, and they weren’t going to let any of it pass by unnoticed.

What I’m Already Taking Home

I came to Omaha expecting good baseball. I’m leaving with something I didn’t expect, a reminder of what it looks like to show up fully for the moment in front of you, whatever that moment happens to be asking of you. Erik showed up for his father’s memory on the hardest day of the calendar to do it. Carter showed up for a future he planned years before anyone offered him a scholarship. Caden showed up for a kid in the stands who reminded him of himself not that many years ago.

Monday night, my boys and I sat in the stands at Charles Schwab Field and screamed for three hours straight. Oklahoma had a different plan for that game than the Tar Heels did. They jumped ahead early and never let up, and by the middle innings it was clear this one belonged to them. UNC lost 13-2. The national championship that has eluded this program for nearly eighty years is still out there, waiting for some future Carolina team to finally claim it.

I won’t pretend the walk out of that stadium didn’t sting. My boys were quiet for a while. So was I. But here’s the reason I write The BOLD Life. Minor in money. Major in life. That phrase means something specific to me. Money is a tool. It bought the last minute flights that got my sons and me here. It is not the scoreboard for a life well lived. The scoreboard for a life well lived looks a lot more like what we watched all weekend, win or lose. A young man carrying his father’s memory into the biggest moment of his life and still finding a way to play his best game. A walk on who chose the harder, smarter path toward becoming a doctor instead of chasing a roster spot that was never guaranteed. An eighteen year old who, after the biggest moment in his life, walked over to make sure no kid left the ballpark without an autograph.

That’s the whole philosophy in three young men, and it didn’t change one bit when the final score went up on the board. Build something that matters. Work for it honestly. Never let the achievement, or the loss, become bigger than the people and character behind it. UNC didn’t come home with a national championship. My sons and I came home with something I’d argue is harder to find. A Father’s Day none of us will forget, a flight we’ll talk about for years, and three names we’ll remember long after we’ve forgotten the final score. These Tar Heels are champions in the way that matters most, and Coach Scott Forbes and his staff should be proud of every single one of them.

I certainly am.

Start Bold

Three young men, three different ways of showing up. This week, ask yourself which one you needed to hear most.

Erik reminds you that showing up doesn't mean having it all together all the time, and that's okay. Carter reminds you that the boring, smart choice now is the one that builds the life you actually want later. Caden reminds you that the small moment with the person in front of you matters more than the big moment everyone's watching.

Which one hit you hardest? Drop a name, Erik, Carter, or Caden, in the comments and tell me why. I read every single one.

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