As Ozzy Osbourne’s “Centre of Eternity” blasted through a high school gym in South Plainfield, N.J., Troy Heilmann stood in the darkness.
When the PA announcer began to read his name, Heilmann emerged. He walked into the Eye of the Tiger — a spotlight trained on the middle of the wrestling mat — as the crowd banged on the metal bleachers, again and again.
Five years later, Heilmann described this scene to The Daily Tar Heel. And in a story chronicling his wrestling career, from New Jersey to Chapel Hill, that’s what stuck with me: the music, the atmosphere, the superfan known as ‘The Tuna,’ who had been banging on those bleachers for almost 30 years.
As sports editor last year, my favorite job by far was helping my writers put together feature stories like this one. It was always a three-week process, full of interviews and transcribing and editing, but it always ended in the same way: an in-depth look at the life of a UNC athlete, and something the writer was always proud of.
Here at the DTH, we have the unique opportunity to feature athletes from every varsity sports team. That’s what we’ve done for years, and will continue to do.
And, above all else, it’s the detail that stands out. I read and edited a lot of features last year. So, I thought I’d a compile a list of some of the best details from those stories:
- When UNC golfer William Register was a kid, he was playing tackle football inside his house in Burlington with two friends. When one of them caught a pass, William tackled him through the wall. The silhouette of the friend going through the wall is still there.
- Alexa Graham and Jessie Aney, the third-ranked women’s tennis doubles team in the country, first met each other when they were 14 years old, at a USTA camp. Aney was rocking knee-high blue socks and yellow Crocs. The first thing Graham said to her future UNC teammate: “What the hell are you wearing?”
- Cameron Johnson, a graduate transfer on the UNC basketball team, was 2 years old when his parents bought him his first pair of Jordans. After playing outside in them one day, he calmly walked into his house and grabbed a roll of paper towels. When his mom asked him what he was doing, he replied, “I’m cleaning the bottom of my shoes!” and happily went about his business.
- Chris Cloutier and William McBride, both members of the UNC men’s lacrosse team, bonded in drama and geology class as first-years. In the future, they plan to move to California to open up a restaurant selling poutine, a Canadian dish of French fries, cheese curds and brown gravy. The restaurant’s name? The Cloutinerie.
- Women’s lacrosse player Marie McCool lost in the state championship in her first year of high school — and she never lost again. Her Moorestown, N.J., team went 77-0 over the next three years and won three state titles.
- Gianluca Dalatri’s father, Rich, was the first full-time strength and conditioning coach in NBA history, with the New Jersey Nets. This allowed the UNC pitcher to watch 10-time All Star Jason Kidd putting himself through hard leg workouts on gamedays. The young Dalatri later realized that Kidd was testing himself mentally — Kidd didn’t need to work his legs so hard hours before a game, but if he could do that, and still dominate, he had won the mental game. Dalatri has used the same strategy in his workouts ever since.
This is just a taste of the journalism we strive for on the sports desk: longform, humanizing and vivid. These are anecdotes that, in all likelihood, have never been reported before and won’t be reported again. The type of story that an athlete’s parents will frame and hang onto for years.
If you appreciate this kind of storytelling, and want to tell such stories yourself, the sports desk might be for you.
