Month: July 2018

One of the first lessons I learned as a pup starting out in the sportswriting business all those many years ago was to avoid cliches.

What I wasn’t told is that cliches are unavoidable.

In defense of cliches, if they didn’t contain at least a kernel or three of truth they wouldn’t have been repeated often enough to become cliches. And even if they didn’t, coaches quotes are the mothers’ milk of any beat reporter, and I never in my time met a coach would could avoid making a point in the same wording it had been made countless times before.

Dave Clawson is hardly the first coach to maintain that he wasn’t out to build just a team; his goal was, instead, to build a program. And he certainly won’t be the last.

Pay attention and you’re liable to hear the same words spoken dozens and dozens of times this preseason alone.

Four years into his stay at Wake, Clawson has proven he can build a competitive team. He proved it twice, in 2016 and 2017, with both teams closing winning seasons with resounding bowl victories.

The case can even be made that Clawson has proven he can build a program. He certainly did so at Richmond, and again at Bowling Green.

The looming question, of course, is has he done enough to build a program even at Wake Forest? My sense is that, yes, Clawson has indeed succeeded where so many who came before failed.

But those looking for confirmation may be holding out to see what happens in year five, which begins tomorrow morning with the first practice of preseason.

The personnel losses from last season’s 8-5 edition would be enough to send most of the gains from past rebuilding efforts swirling down the drain. Gone, of course, is quarterback John Wolford, the heart and soul of Clawson’s first four Wake teams. No one is irreplaceable, but John Wolford comes as close as any Wake player I can name since maybe Riley Skinner.

Others who left the college playing field for the last time after the 55-52 Belk Bowl victory over Texas A&M include tight end Cam Serigne, defensive ends Duke Ejiofor and Wendell Dunn, linebackers Jaboree Williams and Grant Dawson, kicker Mike Weaver and even safety Jessie Bates III, the first Wake player ever to leave college for professional football after his sophomore season.

I added them all up, and if my public-school education hasn’t failed me, that’s a total of 275 career starts right there.

Exacerbating the loss of Wolford was the off-season news that his heir apparent, Kendall Hinton, will be suspended for the first three games of the season for the ubiquitous “violation of team rules.’’ So whoever starts the Aug. 30 opener against Tulane – be it redshirt sophomore Jamie Newman or freshman Sam Hartman – will be starting for the first time since high school.

Before Jim Grobe, success was always frustratingly fleeting at Wake. The conventional wisdom was that a coach might be able to keep a core of players long enough to make a little noise for a season or two, but eventually the loss of those players would relegate the Deacons back to their customary spot at the bottom looking up.

The reasons I think the success Clawson has built can be sustained are three-fold.

First, he and his staff have recruited aggressively, and they’ve recruited well. What more proof do we need than the influx of such game-changers as Greg Dortch and Scotty Washington and Chuck Wade and Essang Bassey and Matt Colburn and Cade Carney, not to mention such potential game-changers are Newman and Hartman and Sage Surratt and Boogie Basham and Coby Davis and Christian Beal and Jeff Burley and Chase Monroe and Sulaiman Kamara and Mike Allen?

If the game-changers continue to change games and the potential game-changers prove they can as well, the Deacons won’t be lacking for ACC talent.

Second, Clawson and his staff have proven to me that they know what to do with talent good enough to compete with the teams on their schedule.

But my prediction that Wake is gearing up for its third straight-winning season – which has been done only once since the ACC began – is based mainly on the old slogan for the cigarette that helped make our fair burg famous.

It’s what’s up front that counts.

And up front on offense Wake has the fruits of Clawson’s unrelenting efforts to build from scratch an offensive line that is the envy of other teams in the ACC. It was a long, arduous process that I was there to watch, as Clawson and his coaches bit a whole bandolero of bullets in half while playing offensive linemen too young, too inexperienced and too overmatched physically to block those they had been assigned to block.

But over time – in this case three seasons – those young linemen, Justin Herron, Phil Hayes, Ryan Anderson, Patrick Osterhage and Jake Benzinger, grew and continued to grow into grizzled, physically imposing players with a very grand total of 123 starts among them.

The surest way to control a game of college football is with a dominant offensive line that allows a coach to dictate and not always be in a position of having to react. Rarely do you see a losing team with a strong offensive line, and I don’t expect to see one this season at Wake.

The players I got to know best during my days as Wake beat reporter for the Winston-Salem Journal were the ones who made an impact early in their careers, and thus were the guys I needed to talk with after games and practices and during our weekly Tuesday gathering to eat chicken and talk football.

Few players in my time made a more immediate impact than Cam Serigne, whom, I’m pleased to say, I got to know quite well during what is sure to be a Hall-of-Fame four-year career.

Wake completed only 12 passes in Dave Clawson’s first game as head coach, a decidedly inauspicious 17-10 loss at Louisiana-Monroe. It was also the debut of Serigne, whose three catches tied Matt James and EJ Scott for team best.

By season’s end he had emerged as one of the few bright spots of a long and dismal 3-9 campaign. His 54 catches not only led the Deacons, but also set a school record for tight ends, as well as any redshirt freshman.

Cam, luckily, was easy to get to know, a real stand-up guy who I’ll remember best for his bright eyes and ever-present smile. Along the way I also had the pleasure of meeting his father David on the Deacons’ road trip to beat Indiana in the fourth game of the 2017 season, and I could tell where Cam’s good nature came from.

College football is a grueling sport, and Serigne, like most players, had his share of ups and downs. After catching 46 passes as a sophomore, a nagging hamstring that just wouldn’t heal bothered him throughout his junior season. That, and an ever increasing emphasis on the running game resulted in him catching only 30 as a junior.

But Serigne, who had by then transformed his body from a 220-pound redshirt freshman to a 250-pound redshirt junior, was always best when needed most. And one of my favorite plays of the season was when he caught the 41-yard touchdown from John Wolford to start the scoring in the Deacons’ 34-26 Military Bowl victory over Temple.

His senior season, in many ways, was his best. The Deacons stacked another story on Clawson’s remarkable rebuild by finishing 8-5. And although he ranked fourth on the team with 44 catches, nine of them came in the Belk Bowl in a 55-52 shootout victory over Texas A&M. He also tied Greg Dortch for most touchdown catches for the season, with nine, and his 37-yard reception from Wolford in the second quarter not only staked Wake to a 38-21 lead, but also set an ACC record with 21 career touchdown catches by a tight end.

What a memorable way to end an unforgettable career.

So by reading this you have to know how happy I was to see the news that Serigne has signed a free agent contract with the Carolina Panthers, and how hard I’ll be pulling for him to make the team. It won’t be easy, given that the Panthers have five other tight ends – Greg Olsen, Ian Thomas, Chris Manhertz, Evan Baylis and Jason Vander Laan – also competing for a start on the opening day roster.

But Cam showed us all who he was during his time at Wake, a determined, dedicated, talented young man willing to do whatever it takes to make his team better without one word of complaint or regret.

Last seen on the field, he was at Bank of America Stadium catching nine passes in a victory.

What a great story it will be if he’s back in that field when the Panthers’ open their 2018 season at home on Sept. 9 against the Dallas Cowboys.

Certain records are relics of their era.

Two that immediately come to mind are from 1941, when Ted Williams was the last player in Major League Baseball to bat better than .400 and the 1961-62 NBA season when that force of nature named Wilt Chamberlain was the last to average better than 50 points for an entire season.

I’ve lived 65 years and hope for many more, but I never expect to see either of those records seriously challenged.

Closer to home, one record that at least appears unassailable is averaging 30 points over an ACC basketball season. That was last accomplished in 1961-62, and was last seriously threatened by the Great David Thompson of N.C. State, who averaged 29.9 over his senior season of 1974-75.

In the years since, no one has come closer than the 27.7 points Dennis Scott averaged for Georgia Tech in 1989-90.

The last man to average 30 in a season was a two-time ACC Player of the Year, a first-team All-ACC performer in all three seasons of varsity eligibility who was the go-to star for the only Wake Forest team to ever play in the Final Four the same season (1961-62) he became the school’s first consensus All-American.

Len Chappell, the greatest Wake player born in the mainland United States, died Thursday. I got the sad news last night when I returned from a long, relaxing day at the beach.

In that he played well before I arrived at the Winston-Salem Journal in 1978, I didn’t know Len well. But I did have the pleasure of talking with him a few times during my days as the Deacons’ beat reporter.

Anybody who knows anything about Wake basketball history knows what a monster Chappell was on the court. A rugged but deft 6-8 center from Portage, Penn., Chappell averaged 24.9 points and 13.9 rebounds over the three seasons he was eligible while shooting 50.7 percent from the floor. During the three seasons he and his running mate and sidekick Billy Packer were on the court, the Deacons won 62 games and lost 27.

Most of what I wrote about Chappell can be found in my two forays into the publishing industry, the first being Tales From the Wake Forest Hardwood and the second The ACC Basketball Book of Fame. It should go without saying Chappell figured prominently in both.

And most of what I know about Chappell came from two people who knew him well, the crusty but unfailingly helpful Packer and this delightful character named Charlie Bryant, who somehow survived – with bottomless sense of humor intact — serving as assistant coach for both Everett Case at N.C. State and Bones McKinney at Wake.

Packer repeatedly told a story that he maintains McKinney told him, about how he and Chappell ended up at Wake in the first place. McKinney, upon succeeding Murray Greason as head coach limped home with a 6-17 record in his first season of 1957-58, so he needed talent and he needed it fast.

As the story goes, he got on the scent of two all-time greats during a visit to see a good friend named Harold Bradley, who also happened to be head coach of rival Duke. During the visit Bradly was said to have left the room without taking the precaution of erasing the blackboard.

“Posted on that blackboard were the names of guys who Duke was recruiting,’’ Packer recounted. “They had Chappell’s and Packer’s names up and that’s how he contacted us.

“That was his story. He always said that’s how he got our names.’’

Though I never had the opportunity to see Chappell play, it sounds like I missed a great one.

“In those days, 6-8 was pretty tall for a center,’’ Packer explained. “But he weighed 255 pounds and it was all solid, and he was an incredible shooter. And he had really good speed and he was a great rebounder – although he was not a great jumper. He had terrific hands.

“He was not a playmaker, and he was not a finesse player, but he could shoot and he could rebound and he could score, and he could shoot from inside and outside. And he more than held his own defensively. He was by far and away the best big man in the league.’’

Given that one of the ACC’s most colorful characters, McKinney, ran the show, those were madcap years at Wake. Packer himself was known to be quite the instigator of all kinds of merriment and mayhem.

But a man needs a plan, and Packer had a fool-proof method of getting what he wanted.

“Packer was the ring-leader of that bunch,’’ Bryant recalled. “He led them around. If Packer wanted something, he would always have Len upfront to do the dirty work.

“And they generally got it.’’

But that was not to say that Chappell was anybody’s fool. He was quiet by nature, and perhaps even a tad shy, but Bryant says it was easy to detect plenty of bytes on the old hard drive.

“Len was a sharp guy,’’ Bryant said. “Everybody thought Len was a dummy. He wasn’t. He was very sharp.

“But Len was just a dynamite player. He had the best touch for a big husky guy I’ve ever seen.’’

I’d forgotten what an impressive nine-season NBA career Chappell forged after being drafted by Syracuse as the fourth player picked in the 1962 draft. He scored more than 5,00 points and made the 1964 All-Star team.

Wake has endured other downturns in his basketball history, though none have been as deep and as long-lasting as the one the program is currently experiencing. In every previous instance, the coach and his staff have been able to go out and recruit the kind of talent needed to pull the Deacons from the doldrums.

In 1959, it was Chappell and Packer. In the mid-70s, when Carl Tacy was endeavoring to get the program back up and running, he brought in Skip Brown and Rod Griffin. Dave Odom wasted no time restoring the program to its previous status when his first full recruiting class included Rodney Rogers and Randolph Childress.

Can incoming freshman Jaylen Hoard be the Len Chappel, Rod Griffin or Rodney Rogers of his day, and if so, will he hang around longer than one season to see that the job of restoration is done right?

Who knows? But to paraphrase one of my favorite songwriters, Paul Simon. . .

Where have you gone Len Chappell?

Wake basketball turns its lonely eyes to you.