Staff Directory
- Title:
- Senior Associate Athletic Director/Men's Basketball Communications
Men's Basketball (primary), Men's Golf, Women's Golf, Carolina Basketball Museum, Men's Basketball Credentials
- Email:
- Phone:
- 919-475-2695 (cell)/919-962-7258 (office)
The 2025-26 season is Steve Kirschner's 42nd in athletic communications, including 37 at the University of North Carolina, where he has been a member of the Tar Heel staff continuously since 1990.
A native of Bristol, Conn., Kirschner is Senior Associate Athletic Director for Sports Information and Media Relations. He manages media relations and communications for the Tar Heel men's basketball and men’s and women's golf programs, serves as a secondary administrator for men’s basketball, manages the department’s historical archives and the Carolina Basketball Museum, oversees the football stat crew at Kenan Stadium and assists with overall departmental strategic communications.
Kirschner was named to the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame board of directors in 2023. He is the chair of the nominations committee.
A 1988 graduate of the University of Connecticut with a B.S. in Sports Studies, Kirschner has held a variety of roles within the UNC Athletic Communications office. As an intern from 1988-89 and Assistant Director from 1990-95, he worked under Rick Brewer and Dave Lohse with the men’s basketball, football, women's soccer, wrestling, baseball, track and field and women's golf teams. He served as Director of Media Relations for Football and Men's Basketball (1995-2000), Assistant AD for Communications (2000-01) and Associate and Senior Associate AD for Communications (2001-12, 2017-20).
He has served as the primary contact for men’s basketball beginning in the 1995-96 season.
Kirschner has worked with numerous Hall of Fame head coaches, including Dean Smith, Roy Williams, Mack Brown, Anson Dorrance, Bill Lam and Dennis Craddock, and National Players/Athletes of the Year Antawn Jamison, Sean May, Tyler Hansbrough, David Ford, Mia Hamm, Kristine Lilly and T.J. Jaworsky, College Football Hall of Famer Dré Bly and NFL and NBA Hall of Famers Julius Peppers and Vince Carter.
All five of Carolina’s men’s basketball coaches Kirschner has worked with have won National Coach of the Year honors (Smith, Bill Guthridge, Matt Doherty, Williams and Hubert Davis).
During his tenure, Carolina men’s basketball has won NCAA championships in 1993, 2005, 2009 and 2017, played in 12 Final Fours and 113 NCAA Tournament games, won 13 regular-season ACC and eight ACC Tournament titles, and had 37 players selected in the first round of the NBA Draft. In 1997, Coach Smith set the all-time NCAA record for coaching wins and was named Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year. Williams was Coach of the Decade (2000-09), and Williams and Smith rank third and fifth all-time in wins by Division I coaches.
The USBWA presented Kirschner with the Katha Quinn Award for service to the media in 2005. He won the National Wrestling SID of the Year award in 1994 in recognition of services provided to the media when UNC hosted the NCAA Championship in the Smith Center.
Kirschner has co-authored with Matt Bowers and Adam Lucas four books on Carolina men’s basketball’s: three detailing UNC's NCAA championships – “Led By Your Dreams” (2005), “One Fantastic Ride” (2009) and “Redemption” (2017) – and the story of the 2022 run to the national championship game ("Together"), and co-produced “Legends in Blue,” a 25th anniversary video retrospective of UNC’s 1982 national championship.
During his tenure as women’s soccer SID (1988, 1990-95), the Tar Heels won six NCAA titles and posted NCAA-record consecutive game unbeaten streaks of 103 and 101 games.
While an undergraduate at UConn, Kirschner worked for four years in the Huskies' sports information office under the direction of Tim Tolokan, Chuck Steedman and Barb Kowal.
He also spent 12 years (1977-88) working for the Eastern League (AA) affiliate of the Boston Red Sox, where he worked with approximately 70 future major leaguers, including Roger Clemens, Wade Boggs, Rich Gedman, Bruce Hurst, Marty Barrett and Ellis Burks.
Kirschner is married to the former Jeanne McFeely, a 1994 Duke graduate, where she was a middle-distance runner on the track and field team. They have two children. Ryan attended Durham Academy and is a 2025 graduate (mechanical engineering) of the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J.. Emilie is a 2023 graduate of the Hill School in Pottstown, Pa., and a red-shirt sophomore on the Northwestern field hockey team.
