Lucas: The Team

By Adam Lucas

OMAHA—Scott Forbes is very good at a lot of things.

Winning baseball games, for one. His Tar Heels did it again Sunday night, besting West Virginia 5-2 to skip ahead to Wednesday's bracket final game. This is the best position they have been in at this point of the season since 2006. That guarantees exactly nothing, but it's June 15 and North Carolina still has a chance to win a national championship, which is the whole reasons 304 Division I teams start playing every February.

Forbes is also very good at recruiting high school players and identifying talent in the transfer portal and creating a culture and running a program.

As he has shown repeatedly during this postseason, however, he is not good at everything. Notably, he is very bad at talking about himself.

He showed it again during Sunday's postgame media session. He talked about Caden Glauber (struck out both hitters he faced) and Walker McDuffie (earned the win with 3.2 innings of great relief) and Gavin Gallaher (the game's biggest swing, a two-run triple), of course.

But he also found a way to mention pitching coach Bryant Gaines and Cooper Nicholson and Macon Winslow.

Nicholson is 2-for-24 in his last six games. Winslow doesn't have a hit yet in Omaha. But in the same way we used to watch Jerry Stackhouse dunk on everyone and Rasheed Wallace post another double-double and then hear a certain former basketball coach make sure to single out Pat Sullivan to the media, Forbes knows his team can't get where it wants to go without contributions from everyone.

And he's not just talking. He believes it. "There's no doubt something good is going to happen for Macon Winslow moving forward," Forbes said in response to a question that had nothing at all to do with Macon Winslow.

That's because this is how you build a team that believes in each other and believes in itself. Forbes is virtually incapable of making it through an entire press conference without mentioning at least one member of his staff and usually several. On Sunday, he credited Gaines' belief that McDuffie would be a solid matchup against the Mountaineers. On Friday, he said Gaines believed Jason DeCaro could stifle Ole Miss. After next Wednesday's game, he's just as likely to credit Jesse Wierzbicki's work with a certain hitter or Scott Jackson's strategical suggestions.

None of the assistants need the public recognition. If they did, they wouldn't be a good fit on this staff in the first place. But Forbes respects his assistant coaches and wants to talk about them. He's clearly the head coach but in the wake of a huge victory, didn't mind letting the public know that a staff member made a good suggestion.

Because it's a team.

The philosophy isn't just something that is talked about on the first day of practice and then never mentioned again. It's written right there on the top of every daily schedule the coaching staff puts together for the team: "No man is more important than The Team. No coach is more important than The Team. The Team, The Team, The Team, and if we think that way, all of us, everything we do, you take into consideration how does it affect the team."

The quote came from former Michigan head coach Bo Schembechler, but as Forbes often says, part of being a good head coach is stealing from other coaches. Forbes has taken plenty from a variety of sources.

But right now he's got his Tar Heels one victory away from playing for the national championship. Some would tell you it's due to timely hitting, effective pitching and smooth fielding. Forbes would eventually get to those reasons, too.

But only after mentioning the most important factor of all: the team.

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University of North Carolina Athletics

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Players Mentioned

Jason DeCaro

Gavin Gallaher

Caden Glauber

Walker McDuffie

Cooper Nicholson

Macon Winslow

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