North Carolina’s national titles, ACC Championships, regular season titles, post-season appearances, and record-breaking resumes of its teams and coaches filled Jones Angell’s script for more than two hours.
No, Angell did not talk for two hours straight, his conversation was interrupted by the recognition and exhibition of the Tar Heel individual and team accomplishments and by the talents of athletes who do more than just compete.
The inaugural Rammy’s Awards, UNC athletics new take on an end-of-the-year awards dinner and banquet, highlighted North Carolina’s most outstanding teams, players and students.
But the Rammy’s are a new format that incorporated athlete’s other talents with a look back at what they’ve accomplished throughout the year.
“We thought this was a way to make an awards banquet and celebrate success and get a lot more students involved,” athletics director Bubba Cunningham said. “We had a lot of input from staff and the students and we just thought we had an event we thought we could make better.”
“I’ll tell you, the students did a great job coming up with ideas and concepts and I just thought it was a lot of fun.”
The Rammy’s recognized this year’s traditional awards, but this year athletes were also recognized through voting for a variety of superlative awards including Most Outstanding Newcomer, Best Championship Performance and Best Record-Breaking Performance.
Student-athlete presenters handed out Rammy Awards to the women’s soccer NCAA championship team for Most Outstanding Team, to Crystal Dunn for Female Athlete of the Year, and Jonathan Cooper via video for Male Athlete of the year.
“I thought it was phenomenal,” track and field senior Marisa Dobbins said. “Everyone involved did a great job and I thought the department did a great job of putting on a show that was very similar to an ESPYs or Grammys.”