As UNC baseball revs up for a new season, one of the program’s greats will be honored next month as Coach Mike Fox will be inducted as a new member of the College Baseball Hall of Fame on February 13th in Overland Park, Kansas.
A UNC grad and Asheville, NC native, Fox played second base for the Diamond Heels from 1976-1978 and also played for Eddie Fogler’s JV basketball squad in ‘75 and ‘76.
Fox was a head coach for 37 years before retiring in 2020. He coached at NC Wesleyan for 15 years before taking the reins for 22 years at Carolina beginning in 1999. He ended his career with a spectacular 1,487-547-5 record.
Under Coach Fox, the program reached unprecedented new heights, including four consecutive trips to the College World Series from ‘06-’09 and seven visits to Omaha overall (including runner-up finishes in ‘06 and ‘07) on top of three ACC Championships.
Mike Fox joins the likes of Mike Schmidt, Roger Clemens, and Mark Teixeira among others for this historic class. He’s the winningest coach in North Carolina baseball history.
And he certainly did not leave the cupboard bare for new coach Scott Forbes, who took the Tar Heels back to Omaha last season. As fellow Tar Heel Blog writer Akil Guruparan pointed out in his season preview, the return of Folger Boaz and Jake Knapp from injury joining up with Jason DeCaro and Aidan Haugh makes for a formidable pitching staff. While there’s a lot of turnover on the offensive side, Mike Fox seems to have left the program in more than capable hands with Coach Forbes.
I had the extraordinary privilege of meeting Coach Fox and I can say he is as amazing a person as he is a head coach. Big congrats to him and his family and all of the players who grew under his guidance.
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