Elliott Avent, NC State bid emotional farewell to Omaha after run to College World Series ends

This could have been Elliott Avent’s final time in Omaha, at least as a coach, and after N.C. State’s season-ending 5-4 defeat against Florida on Monday he lingered on the field, as if he did not want to leave. Who could know when or if he’d be able to walk out of the dugout again at the College World Series?

Who could know whether maybe, just maybe, this might’ve been his final game as State’s head coach? There have been rumblings. Speculative whispers.

Fair or not, that’s the reality for any coach of Avent’s age (68) and tenure (27 years and counting). When his team’s season ended on a windy and cloudy Omaha afternoon, Avent wasted no time, too, in seeking out each of his players and wrapping them in a hug, whispering something in the ear of each.

The message, he said, “was different with every player,” and some of those players were moved to tears by what Avent had told them. Alec Makarewicz, the senior outfielder whose two-run home run in the third inning reflected State’s resilience, was among them. Emotional, almost weeping, he said he didn’t know what Avent had told his teammates.

“But he told me it’s only the beginning for me,” Makarewicz said. “And he’s gonna watch me play in the Big Leagues.”

If it were up to the players, said Logan Whitaker, a senior right-hander whose effort in relief gave the Wolfpack a chance on Monday, Avent “would still be coaching until he goes into the ground.” But there are all the external forces pushing and pulling at the man who has led State’s baseball program for almost 30 years now.

Among them: Age. Everything going on in college sports. The inevitable burnout that comes with trying to keep pace, whether that’s through managing the transfer portal or wrangling NIL dollars or any of the other things that college coaches didn’t have to deal with even five years ago, but that take up a lot of their time now.

Avent dodged a question about how he’d handle evaluating his future. There was no process to it, he said, referencing the framing of a question about what that process might be like in the days and weeks to come.

“Don’t have one,” he said, standing outside of his team’s locker room as it emptied while players made a long walk through the stadium hallways and toward the bus. “I’m not a process guy. I’m a day-to-day guy. I don’t run things down the road.

“I figure out where I’m going tomorrow.”

He’d been hoping that he’d spend Tuesday here in Omaha, back at the ballpark that night for another elimination game against the loser of the Kentucky-Texas A&M game. If he’d timed it right, he could’ve had an early lunch at The Drover, the famed Omaha steak place where Avent dined Friday night, not long after the Wolfpack had arrived here.

But that’s always the thing about trips here: For all but two teams that make the championship series, it never lasts as long as anybody would like. It usually always ends in heartbreak. Three years ago, State’s trip here ended when positive COVID-19 tests forced the Wolfpack’s disqualification. State needed one more victory to make the championship series.

This trip ended with its own version of heartbreak: two one-run defeats that were full of what-ifs and missed chances, and a combined 20 runners left on base. If just two of them make it home, one Saturday and one Monday, these games end in different ways. But that’s baseball and that’s especially the College World Series, which takes this sport’s already-thin margins and slices them even more finely.

As celebrated and revered a destination as this place is, it has crushed far more dreams than it has allowed. Though making it here and ending a season here, even in a loss — even in two consecutive losses — is also a dream that only a small percentage of teams and programs ever accomplish.

The journey itself to Omaha, Avent said, had been the “ride of a lifetime, because this place is so magical.”

“It’s so fun to get here and it’s so hard to leave,” he said.

In 2021, the specter of the unknown came to haunt Avent and his program. The Wolfpack that summer might’ve been playing at a higher level than any team in the country. It won its first two games in Omaha and the championship series was within reach, right there, before the disqualification that State’s players and coaches, and fans, viewed more as theft.

For three years, State carried a goal of getting back here. It could not change the past but there’d been a yearning to atone for it, in a way, and deliver a full-circle, storybook finish. It was not meant to be. The Wolfpack on Saturday endured the cruelty of a 10-inning walk-off loss against Kentucky, which won with a home run after State scored three late runs to take a ninth-inning lead.

On Monday, meanwhile, Florida took a 4-1 second-inning lead on Jac Caglianone’s three-run home run to right — a shot that sliced through a fierce incoming wind and reflected why he’s such a coveted Major League prospect — and State played catch-up from there. The Wolfpack played with some resilience.

Makarewicz’s home run in the third made it a one-run game. After Florida added a run in the top of the fifth, State matched it in the bottom. But its final four turns at bat came and went without any runs, and the ninth ended quietly — three up and three down, and soon Avent was looking for somebody to hug.

It was a little reminiscent of Jim Valvano in 1983 in Albuquerque, and Avent has referenced Valvano a lot lately, and that never-give-up spirit that drove Valvano toward the end of his fight against cancer. Avent has tried to instill that resilience into his program. He has embraced Valvano and the rest of State’s sports history and culture, and with as long as Avent has become something of the elder statesman of N.C. State athletics; a caretaker and promoter of all things Wolfpack.

And that was part of the emotion here on Monday, because who could be sure when or if Avent would have this kind of chance again? Who could be sure whether he wanted such a chance, or whether he might be ready for something new?

After Monday, all the State players who experienced the College World Series disqualification will be gone. A few remained, including Sam Highfill, State’s starting pitcher on Saturday, and Noah Soles, the senior right fielder whose spectacular sliding catch on the warning track in the sixth inning personified the lengths he and his teammates were willing to go to keep hope alive.

Avent found Soles the way he found everyone afterward, and “we just shared a great moment,” Soles said. “We just hugged each other and, you know, was just squeezing as tight as I could.”

They’d all been through a lot together. This particular Wolfpack team but also this program over the past few years. And now the man leading it finished up an interview and walked through a long hallway and stopped only a couple times to greet familiar faces. Soon enough Avent walked out of a door and toward the bus, and a large group of Wolfpack fans were there waiting, gathered to applaud him. His third trip to Omaha was over and now came the hardest part: Leaving.

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