It had been 24 hours since his team’s season had ended in heartbreaking fashion, and Scott Forbes was already laying the groundwork for another successful year.
The UNC baseball head coach hosted a sought-after transfer portal recruit in Chapel Hill a day after losing to Arizona in Game 3 of the Chapel Hill Super Regional in 2025 — a stunning collapse after the Diamond Heels had won Game 1 of the best-two-out-of-three series in dominant fashion, 18-2, then held late leads in both Games 2 and 3.
No time to linger, though. The transfer portal was open, and Forbes was set to lose most of his starting position players.
That prospect from the transfer portal ended up committing to UNC, and Forbes is sure glad he did: Jake Schaffner has turned himself into not only one of Carolina’s most productive players offensively and defensively, but also a name to know for the upcoming Major League Baseball Draft.
Schaffner has helped Carolina get back to Super Regional weekend for a third consecutive June. There’s an eerie similarity between 2025 and 2026: in both years, No. 5 overall seed UNC will host an unseeded west coast team which fought its way out of a road regional on its way to Chapel Hill. Carolina is hoping to finish against USC what it couldn’t against Arizona.
“It doesn’t matter what you did in Game 1,” second baseman Gavin Gallaher, one of UNC’s few holdover position players from 2025, said Thursday. “Job’s not finished until it’s finished. You can win Game 1 1-0, you can win Game 1 18-2, but you’ve gotta show up the next day ready to play.”
Forbes said as much in a brief team meeting during the week. The UNC head coach generally shies away from rah-rah speeches (“We’re not playing football,” he said), but he told his team the truth: in postseason baseball, the “better” team will not always win.
“You have to play,” Forbes said. “If that guy, no matter what school it is, trots out there and gets on that dirt and he’s on, you’re gonna be in a battle.”
Look no further than Los Angeles and Atlanta, where the two top teams in college baseball for practically the entire season – No. 1 UCLA and No. 2 Georgia Tech – both shockingly failed to escape their own regionals. The Bruins did not even reach the regional final, while the Yellow Jackets led Oklahoma in the late innings on back-to-back days but lost both times.
In 2025, UNC entered the NCAA Tournament ranked No. 1 in the national polls and – despite being lowballed with its No. 5 overall seed – was viewed as serious contender for the national championship. But it was Arizona which punched its Omaha ticket on the Boshamer Stadium grass.
“Losing in a tough way like that,” Forbes said, “that’s happened to us before. And a lot of times, that’s set up more success down the road.”
Forbes does have a point. In 2012, No. 6 overall seed UNC was upset twice in its regional by upstart St. John’s. The next year Carolina won a program-record 59 games, returned to Omaha and reached the national semifinals. In 2017, UNC entered the NCAA Tournament as the No. 2 overall seed but lost twice to No. 4 regional seed Davidson. In 2018, Carolina got back to Omaha again.
Short memories are imperative in baseball. And UNC, for all its success in the last two decades, has plenty of bad postseason memories it’d like to forget. Game 3 against Arizona last season turned when second baseman Jackson Van De Brake booted what would have been a routine double play in the eighth inning, and the Wildcats scored three runs to take a 4-3 lead before the inning was over. After the game, Van De Brake’s nameplate was initially placed on the postgame press conference dais, indicating he would speak to reporters. It was then quietly removed.
In Atlanta, after being walked off by Oklahoma on their own diamond to end a dream season, Georgia Tech’s players lingered on the field in full uniform.
That is the type of unrelenting pain which is seemingly unique to postseason baseball. In a feature about his beloved Boston Red Sox, longtime Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle described it this way:
“Baseball lingers,” Barnicle said. “That’s what makes it so great.”
The Red Sox of between 1918 and 2004 and the Diamond Heels of 2006 to the present day share some unfortunate similarities. Both have come agonizingly close to reaching the unreachable star: the Red Sox lost Game 7 of the World Series four separate times amid the 86-year “Curse of the Bambino,” and UNC has gotten to Omaha eight times in 20 years but come away emptyhanded every time — including back-to-back championship series losses in 2006 and 2007 (to the same team, no less).
Forbes has been with the team for that entire two-decade span. He’s seen the program come as close to a national championship as it ever had before: tied in the eighth inning of the deciding Game 3 of the 2006 championship series against Oregon State, before a throwing error allowed the Beavers to score the winning run. It’s the type of near-miss agony which makes the Arizona loss last season seem mild by comparison.
That history has given Forbes some perspective as he enters the home stretch of his sixth season as head coach.
“Obviously we want to win a national championship, but our program’s about way more than that,” he said. “I look back at last year. Yeah, we didn’t beat Arizona, but that team loved each other, they cared about each other, they got better as men, and that’s what our program’s about. So that’s what we focus on.”
But that elusive national championship trophy would certainly help. And belief is strong within the UNC program that it has all the means to get its hands on one later this month. That’s why Forbes bristled when asked about USC’s dominant pitching rotation coming to Chapel Hill this weekend. Ace Mason Edwards anchors a staff which outranks even Carolina’s in team earned run average — and ranks as the best of any team remaining in the NCAA Tournament. Don’t tell that to Scott Forbes, though.
“We ain’t gonna make it about Mason Edwards,” the former pitching coach said. “We’re gonna make it about us. We’re gonna get in the box, we’re gonna strap it on, and we’re gonna compete.”
Spoken like a man who’d like to catch a flight to Nebraska next week — and stay there for a while.
Featured image via Chapel Hill Media Group/Chance Bragg
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