University of North Carolina Athletics

HONOLULU—Assistant coach Jeff Lebo is walking down the left aisle of the team plane holding a Tupperware container full of chocolate chip cookies.

                  

The University of North Carolina basketball team is about 30 minutes into an 11-hour flight from RDU to Honolulu on Wednesday. It’s a huge plane, so there is plenty of room to spread out for the team travel party. 

                  

And here comes Lebo with his cookies.

                  

“I made these!” he says brightly. 

                  

He did not make these. Leslie Davis made them. But Lebo has taken on the assignment of passing them out. There are plenty of takers, so it is not a challenging job, which gives him the rest of the flight to watch film.

                  

Carolina won the first leg of this trip on Friday night, beating Hawai’i 87-69. The storyline was very familiar; the top three scorers were RJ Davis (18), Elliot Cadeau (17 points in a foul-limited 23 minutes) and Seth Trimble (13 points). That’s the fourth straight game the entire trio has been in double figures.

                  

It was not a perfect performance. The Tar Heels were outrebounded 40-27 and gave up 14 second chance points while scoring just two. After addressing his team, Hubert Davis perused the stat sheet. “Did we outrebound them in the second half?” he asked. Rebounding had been a point of discussion at halftime, when the Heels were -9. 

                  

Told the Heels had managed a four-board deficit in the second half, he was briefly miffed but then consoled by the fact that his team allowed just two second chance points in the final 20 minutes. “That’s all effort,” he said on the Tar Heel Sports Network, “and you can’t convince me otherwise.”

                  

Effort is a tricky intangible on a trip like this. It’s physically impossible to play at maximum output for the four games in six days that this journey will require. But the opposition is also good enough that coasting will result in a quick loss. 

                  

Although there are plenty of staff families on the trip, it has been very business-like. The player section of the plane—first class for the players, as dates back to the Dean Smith era, with coaches just behind them or in an exit row for the taller staff like Sean May or Pat Sullivan—was almost completely dark and quiet for the entire flight. When detached from Snapchat and Instagram, you’d be surprised how much college students can sleep (and/or watch Netflix).

                  

But for the rest of the group, the travel day was about preparation. May watched film on his VR headset. Sullivan always has a film session rolling. Lebo, Brad Frederick and Marcus Paige were sorting through a variety of upcoming scouting reports; Lebo woke up before 6 a.m. on Friday to watch LaSalle play University of Illinois-Chicago. The Tar Heels don’t play the Explorers for another three weeks.

                  

The Carolina basketball operation is never-ending.

                  

But it also brings you in contact with some remarkable people. One of the flight attendants on Wednesday’s flight was a two-time Olympic fencing medalist from the Soviet Union. It was a nice reminder that no matter how important your game might seem today, it’s entirely possible that in a few decades it won’t be how people know you. 

                  

It still seems like a very big deal, though, when the Tar Heels arrive anywhere. The first fan through the doors of the Stan Sheriff Center on Friday night was wearing a Tyler Hansbrough jersey. Hawaii had declared a white-out, but a sizable contingent of Carolina fans put a significant blue dent into the white. They lined courtside in the 90 minutes before the game, taking close-up photos and waving signs they had made for the players.

                  

Even in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Carolina basketball is a really big deal—and Friday was a very important night for the Hawaiian fans who live a long way from Chapel Hill but still brave the time difference and the hassles of streaming to follow their favorite team.

                  

They lined up several deep by the team bus after the Carolina win, cheering when each player and coach made their way out of the arena. There are times the Tar Heels linger in the locker room, then spend extended time with the friends and family who traveled to the game. With a flight to Maui imminent in the morning, this was not one of those nights.

                  

“We’ve got a quick turnaround,” Davis reminded his team. “Let’s keep this moving.”

The trip continues.