College football’s best-kept secret is a kid from Greenville who loves Greenville

Holton Ahlers has been thinking lately a lot about his legacy — how he wants people to remember his time at East Carolina, and how he wants to remember it. It’d be an important consideration for anybody in his position, a starting quarterback at a school with a passionate and loyal regional following, but it’s especially important for Ahlers, given his local ties.

In many ways, literal and metaphorical, Ahlers is Greenville and Greenville is Ahlers.

It’d be difficult to find another college football player who shares as much of a connection with his school’s city as Ahlers shares with Greenville. He was born there and grew up about a 10-minute drive from campus. His family always had season tickets to ECU home games at Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium. He cannot remember a time when he didn’t spend fall Saturdays there.

Now, entering his senior season, Ahlers is driven by a constant thought, a goal that’s always at the forefront: Restore the Pirates to what they were for most of his childhood. Lead them to a winning season. A bowl game victory. Overcome the turmoil and defeats of the past several seasons and, as Ahlers described it, “Leave a place better than you found it.”

“That’s what I want to be remembered as,” he said, “and hopefully this year takes a huge step in that direction. I think (of) this year being the year that we get to a bowl game and get us a win. Honestly, I think about that every single day.”

To date, Ahlers has been known around Greenville for a number of things: Little League Baseball prodigy. Local high school football standout. The resilient teenager who during his years at D.H. Conley High persevered through the death of two teammates and his closest friend. That’s part of the reason why everyone around Greenville finds it so easy to root for Ahlers.

They know what he’s been through. They know what the place means to him, too.

“I don’t think there’s anybody I’ve ever met that doesn’t want to see him succeed,” Nate Conner, Ahlers’ high school coach at Conley, said. “I think everybody he comes in touch with, everybody who’s worked with him, had a relationship with him — everybody wants to see him succeed and do well because they know how special the city is to him.

“He doesn’t take it for granted.”

Greenville is big enough to be among the largest cities in Eastern North Carolina but small enough, still, for a Little League Baseball player to become something of a local celebrity. That’s how it was for Ahlers in 2012, when he was 12-years-old and already 6-feet and 185 pounds, according to a story then in the Daily Reflector, the local newspaper.

Ahlers became a folk figure around town for his talent for mashing baseballs over the fence. He hit 27 home runs in one season, according to the Daily Reflector, and easily set a Greenville Little League record. A clip of one of his home runs amassed thousands of views on YouTube. It shows Ahlers’ swing and the pop of the bat. A small crowd cheers. The next sound: A windshield breaking.

“It was like a little, modern day Babe Ruth out there, playing baseball,” said Brian Bailey, an anchor and sports director at WNCT, a television station in Greenville. Bailey is close with Ahlers’ father, and watched Holton grow up. It happened quickly. Those Little League days don’t seem like too long ago. And now, suddenly, Ahlers knows his time competing in his hometown is running out.

**

Ahlers was a high school freshman when he experienced one of the most idyllic nights of ECU football in the past decade. It was a September Saturday in Greenville in 2014. At dusk, the sky transformed into a brilliant shade of orange and purple. The Pirates scored 70 points in a runaway victory against North Carolina.

Baseball was always Ahlers’ sport but, by the end of that game, a new vision had taken hold while he sat in Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium: This would be “a pretty cool place to play,” he said he thought then.

“I dreamed of playing there,” he said. “But I never thought it could have been real.”

Ahlers earned the starting quarterback position at Conley during his freshman season and Conner, his old coach, can still see how his first drive ended: With a pass that bounced off somebody’s facemask and into the hands of a teammate who ran it into the end zone. That was during a playoff game in Scotland County.

Soon, ECU became the first school to offer Ahlers a football scholarship.

“It just kind of took me by surprise — I was like, ‘What the heck?” Ahlers said. All his life he’d been told he was a baseball player “and now I’m getting offered by my dream school in football to play quarterback. So I just kind of ran with it.”

Other offers arrived while Ahlers, a left-hander who epitomizes the football cliche of “gunslinger,” became one of the most prolific high school quarterbacks in North Carolina history. His name is all over the state record book: Fifth in career passing yards (11,198); 11th in single-season passing yards (4,503, in 2016); 15th in single-game passing yards (512, in 2016); fourth in single-season total offense (5,414, in 2016); third in career touchdown passes (145, and one more than UNC quarterback Sam Howell).

Given Ahlers’ roots, it would have been easy to assume that his college choice wasn’t a choice at all. Yet it was, according to Conner, who said N.C. State “did a phenomenal job” pursuing Ahlers. Dave Doeren, the Wolfpack head coach, made Ahlers a priority, “and he liked everything they stood for,” Conner said. Shane Beamer, then an assistant at Georgia, attempted to woo Ahlers out of state.

Ultimately, nothing could compete with the allure of staying home. Not the bright lights of the SEC. Not playing for the closest ACC school, in Raleigh. Ahlers came to realize what he’d known all along: That everything he could ever want in a college football program was there the whole time, a short drive from the house where he grew up.

“This is my home,” he said recently after a long day of practice and preseason meetings. “This means something to me. I mean, it always has. It’s very personal to me because these are the same people that I grew up with, the same people that helped raise me.”

**

Some of the same people who’ve cheered for Ahlers on fall Saturdays the past three seasons are the same ones who gathered in metal bleachers to watch him on Friday nights, and the same ones who helped bring Ahlers to the other side of personal tragedy. During his years at Conley he learned how to grieve. He lost his grandmother, two teammates, his closest friend.

“He experienced a lot of things during his high school career,” Conner said, “that somebody of that age shouldn’t have to.”

Ahlers developed a motto to help him find peace and in those days he put it on a wristband, something he could see to be reminded. The phrase, “Built When Broken,” became a personal slogan, Ahlers said, “to kind of get me through the hard time.”

“I was broken and didn’t know where to look, other than God,” he said.

After college athletes in July received the right to monetize their name, image and likeness, Ahlers launched Built When Broken as what he described as a “faith-based brand,” one he hopes can “help other people in hard times, too,” he said. The meaning behind the phrase is to find strength in faith during dark, difficult moments.

“If I can help someone else from what I went through to help them through what they’re going through, then that is a blessing,” Ahlers said.

He’s not sure whether this might be his final college season. The NCAA essentially gave athletes a free year of eligibility, because of the pandemic. With a strong season, Ahlers could leave school with the confidence of playing professionally. He could also come back. Nobody in Greenville is in a rush to see him leave.

Bailey, the local TV sports anchor, can tell stories of the crowds Ahlers draws sometimes when he’s out and about, people who approach wanting a picture or a moment, and how Ahlers treats them like the neighbors they are. During a recent practice, Bailey brought his stepdaughter onto the edge of the field. She has Down Syndrome, and Ahlers walked past and greeted her with an enthusiastic hello and a high five, “and she’s got a big smile on her face,” Bailey said.

“That’s just how he rolls,” he said of Ahlers.

The Pirates haven’t finished with a winning record since 2014, when Ahlers sat in the stands during that rout against UNC. Since then ECU has had three head coaches, from Ruffin McNeill to Scottie Montgomery to Mike Houston, entering his third season.

Now comes the time Ahlers believes he and his teammates have been building toward. ECU provided some signs of hope a year ago and 19 starters are back, including 10 on offense. Ahlers, though, remains the greatest reason for hope. He has developed a knack during for making the improbable play though, nationally, he’s still perhaps among the best-kept secrets in college football.

That could change this fall, if all goes according to his plan. Ahlers has spent his life in Greenville, 21 years, and he said that he has tried not to think of the inevitable end, that his time at ECU is running out. He has focused instead, he said, on the opportunity ahead. On leaving a place better than he found it. On what it’d mean for a hometown kid to turn the hometown school into a winner again.

“I think this is the year,” he said.

Holton Ahler’s ECU stats

Passing

Rushing

This story was originally published September 1, 2021 at 9:09 AM with the headline "College football’s best-kept secret is a kid from Greenville who loves Greenville."

Andrew Carter

The News & Observer

919-829-8944

Andrew Carter spent 10 years covering major college athletics, six of them covering the University of North Carolina for The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer. Now he’s a member of The N&O’s and Observer’s statewide enterprise and investigative reporting team. He attended N.C. State and grew up in Raleigh dreaming of becoming a journalist.