Power Echols has always left a strong first impression. He aims to leave a lasting one at UNC

It’s never taken Chambers High School alum Power Echols long to leave a first impression.

His high school football coaches Aaron Brand and Glenwood Ferebee both recall Echols immediately standing out.

Brand saw Echols play in middle school before the teen joined the program in 2017, and knew he would make an instant impact as a freshman. Ferebee saw film of him after taking the job at Chambers — then named Vance High School — in 2019 and understood Echols’ potential after just one day of practice with the team.

And during his freshman year at UNC, Echols delivered a massive hit on a kickoff return by Florida State early in the first quarter, one that resulted in his controversial ejection on a targeting call. It was only his third solo tackle of his collegiate career.

“From then on we knew what type of man this guy was, we knew what type of player he was and we knew what type of dog we were going to get as he continued to progress,” graduate student Kaimon Rucker said.

“We got him now.”

Echols said that time has “flown by” since his high school days when he returned to Charlotte for ACC football media day Thursday. The linebacker smiled as he reminisced about his team’s historic 2019 state championship triumph, of which he was named MVP.

With years of experience as a starter and a leader at the high school and college level, he hopes to leave his mark on a UNC team that’ll look toward him, among others, to improve the Tar Heels’ defense under new coordinator Geoff Collins.

Echols earned a starting spot at the beginning of his sophomore year and hasn’t missed a game since. The linebacker earned an All-ACC honorable mention in 2022 before earning third-team All-ACC honors last season. He finished with 102 tackles — the second most on the team — 5.5 tackles for a loss, two forced fumbles and an interception.

“Everybody wants to be like him, he’s the prototypical guy,” Ferebee said. “If you wanted to show your team what linebacker play looks like, he would be the guy.”

The Tar Heels still struggled defensively last season, surrendering 27.3 points per game, the fifth-worst mark in the ACC, and giving up at least 30 points in each of their five losses.

Echols believes the team’s defense will be more tenacious under Collins. He also thinks he can help fill the leadership void left by former fellow linebacker Cedric Gray, who was drafted by the Tennessee Titans in April.

“We kind of lost a lot of vocal leadership when he left, so I feel like I’m stepping into that kind of role,” Echols said.

Echols said Gray had taught him to speak up when needed over the last few years, and that he’s also tried to pass on the knowledge he’s gained with experience to his younger teammates at linebacker. Both Brand and Ferebee saw Echols’ leadership qualities in high school and believe he has what it takes to take on an even larger role in that realm for UNC.

“You could see the leadership ability from the beginning,” Brand said. “You knew he was going to be an ultimate leader of something because of his name. You don’t have a name like (Power) and you’re not destined to do the great things he did without having that presence.”

Brand, who coached Echols during his freshman and sophomore years at Chambers, first saw the linebacker play in middle school and had him around the program as a ball boy when he was an eighth-grader before he attended Chambers.

“Just watching how invested he was and how in tune he was to the game of football when he had no deciding factor on the outcome was just a great thing to watch,” Brand said. “I knew once he came into the program that I was going to play him early. … He wasn’t real big at the time, but he was tenacious, he was tough and he was very athletic.”

Echols started as a linebacker during his freshman year and made an instant impact, quickly becoming one of the best — if not the best — players on the defensive side of the ball in the Charlotte area.

He earned back-to-back defensive player of the year honors from The Charlotte Observer as a sophomore and junior. College offers poured in from across the country, but the four-star recruit elected to stay in state and play at North Carolina.

Echols was more recently named the best Charlotte high school linebacker of the last 40 years by The Observer in January, a distinction that both Brand and Ferebee believe he deserves.

“Nobody practiced harder than Power Echols, nobody played harder than Power Echols, nobody’s uniform was dirtier,” Brand said. “The game meant more to Power than just another Friday night, practice meant more to Power than just another Monday through Thursday. He just brought it.”

Echols has continued to build on his high school success while staying true to himself at UNC, something Ferebee witnessed as a part of Virginia Tech’s staff when the Hokies played the Tar Heels in 2022 and Rucker has seen in his three years with Echols.

“The thing is with Power, he’s never changing,” Rucker said. “The guy that he stepped in as a freshman is the guy that you see playing now. He’s always been a guy that’s been full of energy. He’s always been physical. He’s always been smart. He has a knack at the linebacker position.”

Echols features in the later rounds of many 2025 NFL mock drafts and sees himself as an inside linebacker at the next level. He’s never been shy about his NFL and Hall of Fame dreams, whether it was as a sophomore in high school or college, and he is a step closer to reaching them.

But first comes a senior season at UNC in which he feels he and his defense have a lot to prove.

Equipped with one of the most successful high school careers a linebacker from Charlotte has ever had and two years of experience as a starter with the Tar Heels, he believes he can complement the strong first impression he left at UNC with a lasting one.

“When you get to the later end of the year, it’d be the defenses that wins championships,” Echols said. “I already want to earn that respect and really show that we’re a (defense) that wants to win our team some games.”