Nick Weiler can’t remember whose idea it was.
On Monday afternoon, the senior kicker walked into the fifth floor of the Kenan Football Center wearing a t-shirt with the phrase, “Walk-On U,” the nickname Weiler and some of his teammates have given the North Carolina football team, featured on the front.
Weiler said he and some of the other former non-scholarship football players talked about making a t-shirt after more and more walk-ons were making significant impacts on Saturdays. They had a team graphic designer come up with a design and had the shirts made, which Weiler displayed proudly as ESPN cameras followed him around Monday for a “Big Man on Campus” segment.
The shirts, and all the success stories coming from players wearing them, are the culmination of the years of work by Larry Fedora and his coaching staff to build up a culture conducive to walk-ons.
“We’ve never been about if a guy’s on scholarship, or he’s a walk-on — it doesn’t matter,” Offensive Coordinator Chris Kapilovic said. “Once these kids are on the team, they are part of the team. And if you produce, you play.”
The emphasis on building the team up through walk-ons started out of necessity.
“When we came in here, we lost five scholarships a year for the first three years,” Fedora said. “We had to make a conscious effort of going out and actually recruiting and looking at guys that we thought would be good walk-ons …
“We had to convince some of them to come here, and some of them wanted to be Tar Heels, so it worked out.”
Junior receiver Thomas Jackson has made the transition from walking on at North Carolina, paying his own way, to earning an athletic scholarship. He says it comes with added responsibility to perform for the team.
