My favorite memory of college isn’t a party, a basketball game or a night out at bars. It’s a week in a co-worker’s spare bedroom at his childhood home in Denver, N.C.
It was there — in between well-worn sleeping bags and dusty PlayStation 2 discs — that I elected to spend my spring break in 2019. And it was there I found out that joining The Daily Tar Heel would be one of the best decisions I ever made in college.
I was an assistant sports editor that year, having joined the office full time in the spring with zero friends in the building and even less of an idea of what to expect. I was thrown into the mix as one of a handful of newcomers that semester, with the rest of the office having had half a year to gel.
I was scared.
But I was lucky enough that the rest of the sports desk — editor Chris Trenkle, assistant editors Jack Frederick and Holt McKeithan — saw past my obvious fear. They welcomed me with open arms, and the rest of the office did, too. Two months in, I still didn’t feel like a real DTHer, but I was getting comfortable — comfortable enough that when Chris asked me if I wanted to cover the ACC Tournament in Charlotte, I gave only a few seconds’ thought before answering.
“Sure,” I said. I didn’t have any other plans.
So Chris and I made the two-hour trek to Denver, just outside of Charlotte, and crashed at the lovely home of Chapel Fowler to cover the Tar Heels’ conference postseason run. Chapel’s family welcomed us with open arms as we ate his food and trashed his guest bedroom.
I came in with something of a business-first (read: overserious) mindset: go to the game, write your story, go home.
The three of us did that, but we did so much more. We played pickup hoops with Chapel’s younger brother (my team kicked ass, if memory serves). We ate copious amounts of Chick-Fil-A. We got to know each other beyond the basics, talking music, movies and sports and geeking out about covering some of the most thrilling basketball we’d ever seen. We became friends.
