How Scott Forbes remade himself, made UNC baseball his own and led Tar Heels to Omaha

The relationship that forever changed the trajectory of North Carolina baseball, one that fueled the Tar Heels’ rise to a near annual contender to reach Omaha and the College World Series, began inauspiciously enough.

It began with a father imploring a coach to help his son.

The coach was Mike Fox and he was, at the time of this meeting, in charge of the baseball program at North Carolina Wesleyan, the Division III school in Rocky Mount. The son was Scott Forbes, whose father had taken him to Rocky Mount in hopes of a fresh start or maybe a second chance.

They knew each other already but only a little. Fox first met Forbes when Forbes was a teenager at Lee County High in Sanford, where he was among the best hitters in the state. He spent a season at Middle Georgia, a junior college — but only a season before, as Fox said, “he needed to find somewhere else to go.” And then here was Forbes and his father showing up at Wesleyan.

All these years later, about 30 of them, and Fox can still hear Forbes’ father, almost pleading:

“You have my permission to do anything you want, to straighten this boy out.”

“So that’s kind of how the journey began,” Fox said earlier this week.

A tearful transition

North Carolina is back in the College World Series for the 12th time, and for the eighth since 2006. This is the Tar Heels’ first trip back to Omaha, though, since Forbes became head coach in August 2020, taking over the program that Fox, Forbes’ longtime boss and mentor, had built into a national power during his 22 seasons there.

When everything was finalized almost four years ago and when Forbes’ ascent to head coach became official, he and Fox shared an emotional moment. Both men cried, Fox said. And sometimes Fox still sees the emotion come out of Forbes, as it did late last week after UNC held on for a tough 2-1 Super Regional victory against West Virginia to secure its return to Omaha.

“The reason I’m sitting here,” Forbes said then, after the game, “is because coach Fox took a chance on, you know ... a renegade junior college player that he didn’t have to take a chance on. And he gave me that chance at North Carolina Wesleyan.”

Forbes paused a beat before he’d settled on the word “renegade.” Other descriptors could’ve fit him in those much younger years, when he’d worn out his welcome after a season of junior college ball and sought a new beginning at Division III school not too far from his Lee County roots. At Wesleyan, Forbes said, “I realized quickly that if I didn’t run hard to first base and I didn’t go to class and I didn’t do what I was supposed to do, I was going to be off the team.”

“So it’s what I needed at the time.”

Following a legend

One of the most enduring cliches in sports is that nobody ever wants to be the man, so to speak, to follow The Man. The men’s basketball coaches at both UNC and Duke are learning what that’s like, with every lull or loss becoming a referendum on Hubert Davis and Jon Scheyer; a point of comparison to their Hall of Fame predecessors, Roy Williams and Mike Krzyzewski.

Forbes has had to navigate that dynamic, too. During his 22 seasons at UNC, Fox led the Tar Heels to five ACC championships — three in the tournament and two in the regular season. They became regulars in the NCAA Tournament, and made semi-annual appearances in Super Regionals. There were the seven trips to the College World Series and two runner-up finishes, in 2006 and ‘07.

Though Fox retired, the expectations and standard remained the same. The results, meanwhile, took a while. Forbes’ first three seasons all ended with .500 finishes in the ACC. The Tar Heels didn’t advance out of regionals in 2021 and last season, and in between suffered a sweep against Arkansas at home in a Super Regional.

Earlier in that 2022 NCAA Tournament, in a defeat against VCU, Forbes argued a call that he thought was wrong and an umpire ejected him. He was forced to watch from home while the Tar Heels kept their season alive with two victories in one day, which forced the regional into a deciding game the next day that they also won.

In a way the ejection spoke to the passion always bubbling just beneath the surface for Forbes. It spoke to a temper he has worked to contain, and to a will to win, to compete, that has now carried him from the most humble depth of college baseball to its peak.

Baseball in his blood

Forbes, who’ll turn 50 later this year, has always been a baseball lifer. The game has tried to shake him away on occasion but he never let go. There were his high school years at Lee County, where he ranked among the best hitters in the state, his stats right up there with the likes of Trot Nixon, once a North Carolina schoolboy folk hero and the No. 7 pick in the Major League draft in 1993.

There was, for Forbes, the brief stint in junior college and then the second chance at Wesleyan, where he led the Battling Bishops to the 1997 Division III College World Series. He set a national record then for doubles and somewhere along the way, before such a thing was all that common or popular, made the game a literal part of his body with a tattoo of a baseball near his right shoulder.

“Similar to the logo of the movie, ‘Major League,’” Forbes said in a 1997 story in the Rocky Mount Telegram, sounding sheepish. “I can’t say I’m proud to have that. ... My mom hated it when she first saw it. But now she says it’s kind of cute.”

His parents worried about him, at times, which is why Forbes’ dad asked Fox to straighten him out and hoped that was possible. When Forbes was even younger, he’d cry after losses — “a mad cry,” as he described it recently.

“They had to teach me how not to cry after we lost, every single time,” he said.

That’s how much it meant to him. Forbes arrived at Wesleyan with a quick temper and emotions that sometimes, maybe even most of the time, got the best of him. His final two years, though, and after Fox returned from a one-season sabbatical to spend time with his family, Forbes became the kind of player coaches live for; a player who wasn’t afraid to hold his teammates accountable.

Forbes was a player who could get in his teammates’ faces if they weren’t hustling. He was the guy who’d put a stop to whatever shenanigans college-aged guys might want to get into, say, the night before an important game. It was only Division III and nobody was a Major League prospect, or close to it, and yet to Forbes it was everything. Winning was everything.

And then amid all that growth and maturation came one of the most difficult endings imaginable: a groundout to shortstop with the bases loaded in the bottom of ninth; a groundout in a one-run game, when a hit from Forbes would’ve kept Wesleyan alive in the ‘97 Division III World Series. Instead, the 4-3 defeat against Cortland State sent the Bishops home.

The groundout came in Forbes’ final college at-bat.

“I remember him hitting the daylights out of it,” Fox said, “but it was right at the shortstop.

“But it happens. It’s sports.”

Starting at the bottom

How badly did Forbes want to stay in the game? How badly did he want to coach?

Badly enough to start at the lowest ranks, helping Fox for a season back at Wesleyan. Badly enough to spend a summer coaching the Wilmington Sharks in the Coastal Plain League, driving the van and everything else. And badly enough to follow Fox to Chapel Hill when Fox became UNC’s head coach before the ‘99 season.

Except, one catch: It didn’t come with a salary or, well, any money at all. It was, instead, one of those for-the-love-of-the-game volunteer positions.

“I was like, I don’t even know what a ‘volunteer coach’ is — but do you want to be one?” Fox said with a laugh earlier this week, recalling the first conversation with Forbes about joining UNC’s staff. Just to be clear, Fox felt the need to articulate the obvious back then.

“You’re not going to get paid,” he told Forbes.

At the time, Forbes was considering going back home to work in the family construction business. But there was the allure of baseball. The calling. There was a sense that maybe he could take his love for the game, and understanding of it, and instill it in the next generation. And the next.

And so it wasn’t much of a decision at all. Forbes worked early mornings at a local Chapel Hill gym, in a job that actually paid. He came in after that and worked for Fox and his staff of full-timers. He learned. He studied. He left for three years to be an assistant at Winthrop — paid, this time — and then returned to UNC in 2006 when Fox brought him back to be the Tar Heels’ pitching coach.

He’d never been a pitching coach but he knew pitchers, and pitching, from his years playing catcher at Wesleyan. And besides, Fox thought it was almost idiot-proof, not that he was worried. UNC had a bevy of arms, what with Andrew Miller and Daniel Bard — two future first-round MLB draft picks — and Robert Woodard, who spent time in the minors. The thought for Forbes as pitching coach in 2006 was “just don’t mess this up,” Fox said.

And he didn’t. In Forbes’ first season as the Tar Heels’ pitching coach, UNC went to Omaha. And the next. And the year after that. And in 2011 ... and 2013 ... and 2018. And by the time he retired, Fox knew he wanted to take over the program he’d built, knew who should take over the program he’d built.

Maturing into a leader

The man who did sat atop the bench of the home dugout at UNC’s Boshamer Stadium earlier this week and reflected for a moment about his own journey. The Tar Heels had earned their way back into the College World Series. They’d leave for Omaha the next day. It was hardly new for UNC — but it was a first for Forbes as head coach, and after a challenging first three seasons.

“I would say I’ve changed a ton,” Forbes started to say, referencing how he’d been “ultra competitive,” and maybe too much, for a long time. He spoke of the crying after losses. The temper that sometimes got the best of him in his younger years, or at least more often than it does now.

Having his own children helped, he said. One of his two daughters is a college athlete, herself; a volleyball player at UNC-Wilmington. Forbes learned what mattered in life, and what mattered wasn’t always being driven to tears over a baseball game. He has said he has aspired to build his program on a players-first foundation. A Christian, Forbes has relied on his faith.

And one more thing, and “you heard the players talking about the other night,” Forbes said, referencing the emotional postgame after the Tar Heels beat West Virginia to win the Super Regional. “And as corny as it sounds, you know, the backbone of our program is love.”

It’s not just one of those things coaches say. After UNC’s most recent victory, the word kept coming up, players using it again and again to describe the program.

Said Vance Honeycutt, the record-setting home run hitter, of Forbes: “He loves us, and wants the best for us.”

Said Dalton Pence: “I don’t think you’ll find a coaching staff in the country that loves their players as much as his team.”

Said Jason Decaro: “You come to the field everyday knowing that you’re in a place where you are truly cared for and loved. We don’t take that word lightly here.”

It took a while for Forbes to reach a point where he could radiate that kind of positivity. To where he could lead in such a way. He did, and now he has his program back in Omaha.

In the Spotlight designates ongoing topics of high interest that are driven by The News & Observer’s focus on accountability reporting.