Football, often source of collegiate chaos, can be force for good on traumatized campus
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UNC Shooting
UNC professor Zijie Yan was fatally shot Aug. 28, 2023, in Chapel Hill, NC,, prompting an hourslong lockdown and questions about campus security. Yan’s graduate student has been charged with his murder. Here is ongoing News & Observer coverage about the killing, the campus response and the aftermath.
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There are times, in the wake of an on-campus tragedy, when it makes sense to put everything, including football, on pause. For North Carolina, this is the rare moment when football, the 800-pound gorilla that overwhelms everything else about not just college athletics but colleges, period, can actually help a campus move forward.
That’s what Saturday’s game against South Carolina can do. It helps, in that respect, that it will be played in Charlotte, and not amid a grieving university community in Chapel Hill. In this very specific case, football can be a rallying cry, not a distraction. The fact that it, despite being a multibillion dollar business, remains inherently trivial compared to life and death will come as a relief to a campus that has spent too much time considering those matters this week.
Because while there was real and heartbreaking loss on Monday — the senseless death of a beloved physics professor — it was the collective trauma that settled as heavily as that grief — the overwhelming and shared fear that this was not the matter of personal violence it apparently turned out to be, but a random shooter bent on sowing death, the unknowing that lives at the heart of every alert and lockdown in our era.
We live with that sinister uncertainty now, the question that cannot go unasked when the moment comes — and it comes for us all, even Chapel Hill kindergartners on their first day of school, starting the rest of their lives with a lockdown, just in case.
That it wasn’t that, the way it was at Virginia Tech in 2007 or Virginia last fall or Michigan State in February or any number of campuses that have gone through what North Carolina when through Monday — too many, too many — may provide the small solace that things weren’t any worse than they were but doesn’t take away one iota of the shared agony of the hours spent in hiding, fearing and believing it could be.
So how does everyone heal from that? By mourning the dead, to be sure, something already ongoing, and by seeking help in whatever ways and means there are, but by also finding something collective in spirit to experience, to uplift and replace the dread everyone experienced together on Monday.
That leaves this narrow space where football can actually be a force for good, a new common ground upon which everyone can stand, together: students, faculty, fans, community and everyone touched in some way by what happened Monday. And that’s true for South Carolina, too, where a student was shot and killed after trying to enter the wrong house last weekend.
Sometimes it seems like athletics is completely detached from any university’s mission at large, but when these players step out to represent North Carolina on Saturday, they will truly represent the university they attend, and that will be their choice.
The shooting happened not two football fields from where the team was gathered on Monday, only minutes after Mack Brown and his coordinators conducted the first game-week briefing of the season at the Kenan Football Center. The players were given the option to take a step back, but they have continued to practice in preparation for South Carolina, preparing to play even as their classes were canceled as they and their classmates reckoned with the psychic damage that had been wrought.
They are prepared to carry the flag forward, for themselves, for the university, for everyone.
From one shared experience to another, this football game is a chance for everyone to celebrate what it means to be part of a campus community, helping start put together what was torn apart.
Nothing can change what happened Monday, but football, so often the problem in changing colleges for the worse, has a chance to help this university get better, together.
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This story was originally published September 1, 2023 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Football, often source of collegiate chaos, can be force for good on traumatized campus."
