Trapani immediately texted his family.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cActually insane,\u201d his son wrote back. \u201cOne of the most incredible heists of all time.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\ud83d\udce8 STATEWIDE<\/strong><\/p>\n Stories that matter. Stories shaping North Carolina.<\/p>\n Join thousands of North Carolinians in-the-know about their state. Sign up, the newsletter\u2019s free. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.<\/p>\n Trapani, a former CEO who now teaches business at Elon University<\/a>, is a 1979 Duke graduate who has lived in the Triangle<\/a> since 1997. He\u2019s attended all manner of Blue Devils sporting events in that time. Barely two days before getting the alert, he sat in the stands at Jack Coombs Field for the decisive third game of Duke baseball\u2019s first-ever home NCAA super regional. The chance at a College World Series berth for the first time since 1961 was on the line.\u00a0<\/p>\n Trapani remembers feeling confused about why Duke\u2019s players lacked their usual \u201cjuice\u201d as they lost 5-4<\/a> to underdog Murray State. He\u2019d felt the same way during Duke\u2019s 19-9 blowout loss<\/a> the day before. His family did, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n So when the alert arrived that Pollard\u2014the man responsible for turning Duke baseball from an irrelevant ACC backmarker into a perennial NCAA tournament team\u2014had jumped ship after failing to capitalize on the greatest opportunity in program history, Trapani was furious.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cHe quit,\u201d Trapani told The Assembly. \u201cFrom my perspective, he quit on his team. He quit on his school.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Trapani took to Facebook that day to air his grievances, touching on everything from his anger at Pollard\u2019s disloyalty and how many of the team\u2019s best players followed him to Virginia<\/a> (seven Blue Devils decided to transfer there) to how thousands of Duke fans who had just come out to cheer their team on weren\u2019t rewarded with reciprocal effort.\u00a0<\/p>\n But his main gripe was simple: \u201cI really don\u2019t like college sports right now.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Trapani isn\u2019t alone. Many fans across the country have become increasingly disillusioned by a perceived disregard for loyalty and tradition as college sports have become more professionalized and less regulated. In North Carolina, a college sports mecca with 19 schools that compete in Division I (the highest level), the phenomenon has hit hard.\u00a0<\/p>\n Pollard declined to comment for this article through a spokesperson. But two of his Duke players told The Assembly that Pollard<\/a> did not accept the UVa job before Duke was eliminated from the tournament, and that Pollard, a Virginia native who grew up in the state, was open with them about why he took it. They said their coach competed hard that weekend, and they wish him well in Charlottesville.\u00a0<\/p>\n Even if the team felt Pollard was honest with them, that doesn\u2019t remove the shock waves his departure sent through Duke. Nor does it remove Trapani\u2019s feeling of betrayal. In that way, whether Pollard \u201cquit\u201d is not quite the issue. It\u2019s that Trapani believes he did.<\/p>\n \u201cIt feels to me there are a few things that just need to be done to stop this kind of craziness from happening,\u201d Trapani said. \u201cIt just makes it very unrewarding to be a fan of any kind.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Chasing Playing Time (and Money)<\/p>\n The disconnect between college sports fans and their teams has been long-brewing, especially as conferences have expanded and regional rivalries have diluted in the pursuit of larger and larger TV contracts.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Atlantic Coast Conference during the 1970s had seven schools in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and Maryland; even before its recent expansion to Texas and California, it had 15 schools stretching from Indiana to Florida.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n But the inciting moment for many fans can be traced to July 1, 2021<\/a>, when the NCAA, after a U.S. Supreme Court decision, held that athletes could legally begin monetizing their name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights.\u00a0<\/p>\n Now that athletes could be paid, \u201ccollectives\u201d popped up at universities across the country, combining funds from wealthy alumni and sponsorship agreements to entice players to enroll.\u00a0<\/p>\n Recruiting and the transfer portal\u2014once used mostly as a way for players to adapt to coaching departures or a lack of playing time\u2014effectively became an unchecked form of college sports free agency. And because of newly negotiated, eye-watering broadcast contracts<\/a> for the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference, the NCAA\u2019s Power 5 conferences funnelled into a Power 4<\/a> as schools scrambled to grab a slice of the financial pie. That left the Pac-12, which is attempting to rebuild, with just two schools.<\/p>\n Many of the changes that upset fans can be traced to athletic departments\u2019 desire to keep up with competitors and stay financially solvent. According to The Athletic<\/a>, the cost of running a Division I athletic department grew more than 200 percent between 2005 and 2023, with coaching salaries alone rising almost 400 percent. (The cumulative cost of living increase during that period was 56 percent.)\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt just makes it very unrewarding to be a fan of any kind.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Kevin Trapani<\/p><\/blockquote>\n People are frustrated \u201cthat the money is what drives all the decisions, rather than what\u2019s best for me as a fan,\u201d said Isaac Schade<\/a>, a lifelong University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill fan and the host of the daily UNC sports podcast Locked On Tar Heels.\u00a0<\/p>\n This is where another gripe in the \u201cloyalty\u201d conversation comes from, especially in North Carolina, said Joe Giglio<\/a>, a Raleigh-based podcast host who has covered college sports in the state for nearly three decades as a sportswriter and radio host.\u00a0<\/p>\n Since there are no contracts binding players to schools, Giglio said, they\u2019re free to change allegiance at will, often to the highest bidder. And since the 2023 announcement that Southern Methodist University, the University of California, and Stanford University would be joining the ACC<\/a>, the \u201cfraternity\u201d that many fans grew up appreciating among the conference\u2019s four founding North Carolina schools feels less like a defining trait and more like a vestige of a bygone era.\u00a0<\/p>\n For decades players chose their university out of loyalty to a coach, proximity to home, or a program\u2019s tradition; now many are chasing playing time at a higher level and the biggest financial bag. This is often at the expense of spending their college career with a single school or respecting rivalries.\u00a0<\/p>\n Aside from the baseball players who either transferred or flipped their commitment to follow Pollard to Virginia, Duke\u2019s starting catcher, Macon Winslow, made the unprecedented choice to transfer to North Carolina<\/a>\u2014a cardinal sin in the eyes of many Duke fans. But it isn\u2019t just Duke that has been adversely affected.\u00a0<\/p>\n N.C. State and UNC fans alike were left flabbergasted when Ven-Allen Lubin, the starting center for the Tar Heels\u2019 men\u2019s basketball team last season, entered the portal in April<\/a> \u201cwith full intent on returning to UNC,\u201d per a post on X, but then announced his commitment<\/a> to the Wolfpack in early June. A portal addition to N.C. State\u2019s 2024-25 men\u2019s basketball roster, guard Dontrez Styles, played two seasons in Chapel Hill before a year at Georgetown.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cGiven the lack of structure, the lack of rules, you cannot blame someone for taking advantage of the lack of structure and the lack of rules,\u201d Giglio said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt blurs the lines of rivalries is how I would say it,\u201d Schade said. \u201cThere\u2019s less of \u2018you\u2019re a Carolina guy, you\u2019re a State guy, you\u2019re a Duke guy, you\u2019re a Wake guy,\u2019 and you are going to have multiple players with multiple of those institutions on their resume.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Amid disappointing postseason representation compared with fellow Power 4 schools, ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips announced<\/a> earlier this year that ACC men\u2019s basketball will move from 20 conference games to 18 to encourage harder nonconference schedules. As a result, longtime rivals NC State and UNC won\u2019t be guaranteed<\/a> of playing each other twice for the first time in more than a century.<\/p>\n All of this has contributed to a feeling among many that college sports are at the brink of losing everything that has made the state such a stalwart for so long.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of fans feel like they lost that grass roots, that organic, that for-the-love-of-the-game nature of [college sports],\u201d Schade said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Fans Taken for Granted<\/p>\n One of Trapani\u2019s favorite things about being a Duke fan has been the chance to see athletes \u201cgrow up.\u201d He still remembers how devastated his twin children were when he told them that JJ Redick had graduated and couldn\u2019t play in college anymore.\u00a0<\/p>\n This is what Trapani\u2014and many other sports fans across North Carolina\u2014is worried he\u2019s losing, to the detriment of everything that has made supporting his team so special.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s not that players like Cooper Flagg or Zion Williamson leave for the NBA after one year. It\u2019s not that coaches and players\u2014like former Duke football head coach Mike Elko and starting quarterback Riley Leonard<\/a>\u2014come and go, often to programs like Texas A&M or Notre Dame with more fans and resources. It\u2019s not that the exclusive Duke men\u2019s basketball Champions Club that Trapani and his wife were part of for almost a decade has become so expensive that they\u2019ve been priced out, all to finance the university\u2019s $20.5 million NIL budget<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s that fans\u2019 fealty amid all the shifts is taken for granted.\u00a0<\/p>\n This is what irked Trapani so much about Pollard\u2019s departure. If he and thousands of Duke fans\u2014including university president Vincent Price, athletics director Nina King, head football coach Manny Diaz, and a number of men\u2019s and women\u2019s basketball players\u2014packed Jack Coombs Field in the brutal heat to cheer their team on, why didn\u2019t he feel like that loyalty was rewarded?\u00a0<\/p>\n This is where some nuance is helpful.\u00a0<\/p>\n The vacant role in Charlottesville that Pollard filled only opened because Virginia\u2019s head coach, Brian O\u2019Connor, left for Mississippi State<\/a>. When five former Cavaliers followed him and nine more departed for other schools, Virginia was left with the same roster and coaching holes Duke was about to face.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s less of \u2018you\u2019re a Carolina guy, you\u2019re a State guy, you\u2019re a Duke guy, you\u2019re a Wake guy,\u2019 and you are going to have multiple players with multiple of those institutions on their resume.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Isaac Schade, host of Locked On Tar Heels\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In that way, Virginia was a sort of Duke-before-Duke: A beloved coach accepted a more lucrative opportunity elsewhere that became available because he put in the work over more than a decade to build the program he\u2019s leaving. The ensuing scramble is thus more an unfortunate side effect than an overt betrayal.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt still hurts for [Pollard] to leave without achieving that mission that he made so clear of reaching Omaha,\u201d said Elliott Jarnot<\/a>, a three-year baseball beat reporter for The Chronicle, Duke\u2019s student newspaper, who followed the Pollard saga closely. \u201cBut at the same time, he left Duke in a place where they could hire someone who could come in and continue building, rather than completely rebuild.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody was super invested in the program and invested in what guys were going to be doing after their career was over,\u201d said Ben Miller, a star third baseman and Durham native who finished his career at Duke last season after playing three years at the University of Pennsylvania. \u201cGrowing up here, I know what it was like when Duke baseball wasn\u2019t what it is now, and Coach Pollard is pretty much solely responsible for building it into what it\u2019s become.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Both Miller and outfielder Tyler Albright, a two-year starter and one of the few returners for next year, said Pollard told them about his departure at a team meeting on June 10, the day after the super regional. They said Pollard made clear he didn\u2019t coach the series knowing he was leaving\u2014even though Virginia reached out to him before the super regional started\u2014and that he waited to accept the offer until Duke\u2019s season ended.<\/p>\n \u201cHe stood up there and he told us, \u2018Look, guys, they made me an offer I couldn\u2019t turn down,\u2019\u201d Albright said. \u201cHe\u2019s from Virginia, his parents live there, and they\u2019re getting older, and he wants to be near them. He was just honest.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cCoach [Pollard] made it clear when he left that nothing was accepted or finalized until after the season was over,\u201d Miller said. \u201cIt\u2019s not like he had accepted the job and then played the super regional knowing he was leaving.\u201d<\/p>\n Loyalty and Honor<\/p>\n Five days after the news of Pollard\u2019s departure broke, Trapani took to Facebook again. Many of the critiques from his first post remained: Pollard\u2019s lack of commitment, how his interest in the Virginia job sabotaged Duke\u2019s chances at making it to Omaha, how it was inexcusable that Duke lost to a team that got eliminated from the College World Series<\/a> on a no-hitter.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhat happened to loyalty and honor?\u201d someone responded in the comments.\u00a0<\/p>\n The short answer is that it\u2019s complicated. The long answer is that loyalty and honor still exist despite the shake-ups, but how fans, coaches, players, administrators, and universities interpret those concepts has become increasingly incongruent.\u00a0<\/p>\n To Pollard, loyalty was to his family, to keeping his team in the dark about his potential move to pursue their postseason dreams, and then to informing his team as expeditiously and honestly as he could once he made his choice.\u00a0<\/p>\n To Miller, loyalty was coming back to his hometown university to contribute to Pollard\u2019s project.\u00a0<\/p>\n To Albright, loyalty was deciding to continue his family legacy\u2014his dad, grandfather, and uncle were Duke athletes\u2014and finish his degree.\u00a0<\/p>\n And to all those who followed Pollard to Charlottesville, loyalty was continuing to believe in their coach, even if it meant joining a conference rival.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cGrowing up here, I know what it was like when Duke baseball wasn\u2019t what it is now, and Coach Pollard is pretty much solely responsible for building it into what it\u2019s become.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Ben Miller, Duke third baseman<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Trapani and the thousands of college sports fans have a different definition of loyalty. Don the jersey with pride. Fight for it the way those before you have for decades. Treat rivalries not just as traditions but hard lines never to be crossed. To fail on any of these accounts\u2014or even seem like you have\u2014is a betrayal.\u00a0<\/p>\n The TV networks and streaming services paying record money for college sports programming are betting that fans\u2019 devotion will only grow, despite their discontent. Giglio, the podcast host, suspects otherwise.<\/p>\n \u201cCan you just be a fan of laundry?\u201d Giglio asked. \u201cCan you just blindly root for a coach and a school because of the colors and the mascot, or the nickname or the logo? I think that\u2019s really what\u2019s going to be tested.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Andrew Long is a 2025 graduate of Duke University, where he studied political science, history, and journalism. He has written for The Chronicle, The Dallas Morning News, and the Tampa Bay Times.<\/p>\n Are you signed up for The Assembly\u2019s free North Carolina newsletter?<\/p>\n Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you’ll get:<\/p>\n \ud83d\uddde The news you need Sign up today \u2014 it\u2019s free!<\/p>\n \t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/AP25152153439695.jpg\")
Coach Chris Pollard during the NCAA Division I regional game against the Georgia Bulldogs. (Photo by John Adams\/Icon Sportswire via AP Images)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Screenshot-2025-08-09-at-4.44.05-PM.png\")
Trapani took to Facebook to air his grievances.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Duke_Details-5.jpg\")
Trapani keeps a piece of the old Cameron floor among his mementos. (Cliff Hollis for The Assembly) <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Trapani_Duke-1.jpg\")
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Podcasters Joe Ovies and Joe Giglio record in their studio. (Photo by Ethan Hyman, courtesy of Ovies)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/IMG_1202-1200x900.png\")
Trapani with his family. (Photo courtesy of Trapani)<\/p>\n\n
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Duke third baseman Ben Miller celebrates a home run in an NCAA Division I regional baseball game against Georgia. (Photo by John Adams\/Icon Sportswire via AP Images)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Duke_Campus-8.jpg\")
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Some longtime Duke fans feel taken for granted. (Cliff Hollis for The Assembly)<\/p>\n\n
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