What were you doing when you were 23 years old?
Mike Krzyzewski was in his second year of active duty in the Army. He wouldn’t win his first national title until age 44, 21 years later.
Dean Smith was also on active duty, in the Air Force stationed in Germany. He wouldn’t get his first head coaching job for another seven years and wouldn’t win his first NCAA crown until he was 51.
Jim Valvano was coaching the freshman team at Rutgers. He was 36 when he won his title.
Roy Williams was coaching basketball and golf at Charles D. Owen High in Black Mountain. At 55, he finally won his first championship.
Mack Brown was a student coach of the wide receivers at FSU and had to wait until age 54 to win his national title.
Anson Dorrance was player/coach for the Chapel Hill Soccer Club and thinking about applying to law school. The prodigy of the group of legends, he won his first title at the tender age of 30.
Karen Shelton was on the Olympic field hockey team at age 23, but it was the year of the American boycott of the 1980 games in the Soviet Union. She would go on to win the first of her 10 NCAA field hockey titles at age 32.
Hubert Davis and Jon Scheyer stepped into great situations, taking over for Hall of Fame head coaches at elite programs. Davis is 53, Scheyer 36. Neither has coached a national champ yet.
Erin Matson was born on March 17, 2000. Williams, Krzyzewski and Dorrance likely have ties older than that. She’s two years younger than Google. She’s younger than SpongeBob and “Law & Order: SVU.” When she was 1 month old, the Patriots drafted Tom Brady. When she was 2 months old, “Survivor” premiered.
Matson is young, is what we’re saying. And she’s also the North State Journal’s 2023 Coach of the Year.
Like Davis and Scheyer, she was faced with the intimidating task of keeping the winning tradition alive after replacing a legendary head coach at one of the nation’s top programs. Like Valvano, who used to joke about trying to remember — and hilariously mangling — lines from Vince Lombardi speeches while talking to the Rutgers freshman team, she was asked to coach players who were basically the same age as her. (Lombardi, by the way, was still a student at Fordham at age 23 and wouldn’t win his first championship until age 48.)
One year ago, Shelton chose to retire after 42 years as the Tar Heels’ field hockey coach. Matson, the best player Shelton ever coached, graduated the same month. In her COVID-assisted five seasons with the Heels, Matson won five ACC titles and four national championships. She was named national player of the year three times.
She may not have been the obvious choice to take over the Tar Heels, but she got the job.
Athletic Director Bubba Cunningham called her hiring “an idea that you probably do have to sit with for a while to say, ‘OK, am I really going to consider this?’”
The reaction to her hiring may have caused Cunningham to second-guess himself.
“The day I was hired, there was a guy on Twitter: ‘She’s not even old enough to rent a car right now,’” Matson said. “It’s like, ‘All right dude, if that’s the biggest worry you have, I think we’re in a good spot. There is Uber, and I will figure it out because I’m resourceful.”
Of the 28 players on the roster of her first team, 21 had been teammates with Coach Matson the previous season. One of her first decisions was that she needed a new cell phone.
“I have lived with them, I have gone out with them, I know everything about them,” Matson said. “And I felt right when I was hired, they didn’t need to be texting me, ‘Hey Erin, can we sit down and have a talk in an individual meeting and watch clips?’ or ‘Hey, what time are we practicing today?’ But then scrolling up a little bit and seeing things that were on the friend side.”
It was a recipe for disaster, but instead, Matson’s Tar Heels turned in an 18-3 season. They tied for the ACC regular season title, then won the conference tournament. And in November, after playing two overtimes, UNC prevailed in a shootout over Northwestern to win the NCAA title. Matson became the youngest coach in NCAA history to win a championship in any sport.
“Trust me, I have tons to learn, every year is not going to be perfect,” she said. “But hey, this isn’t as crazy as maybe some of the rumors made it out to be.”
