UNC men's and women's track placed 4th and 6th in ACC Indoor Championships

It wasn’t the conference finish coach Harlis Meaders expected from his team, but several Tar Heels shined despite the team’s lackluster performance.

North Carolina’s track and field team placed fourth in the men’s division and sixth in the women’s at the ACC Indoor Championships this weekend.

Fourteen Tar Heels earned All-ACC honors, including Chadd Pierce, a senior who finished his final indoor meet with a third-place finish in the heptathlon.

Meaders is in his first year as head coach, and Pierce said the new coaching has changed the chemistry of the team.

As a result, teams at the meet didn’t know what to expect from the Tar Heels, Pierce said.

And after the first day of heptathlon events, competitors didn’t know what to expect from Pierce, either. Pierce finished 10th in the 60-meter dash, eighth in the long jump and seventh in the shot put.

Pierce, however, is used to coming back from a weak first-day performance, and knew not to count himself out of the medal race.

“Early in my career, like freshman and sophomore year, I would really get discouraged with (the first day of the heptathlon), but now I know what I need to do, like how many points I need to get on day one to be in good position,” Pierce said. “I looked at my score on day one and it was over 2,500, so I knew I was in good striking position to be where I wanted to be.”

Pierce’s momentum swung forward after a first-place finish in the high jump and a second-place finish in the pole vault.

Pierce prepared for the final heptathlon event, the 1,000-meter run, knowing that it was his final opportunity to earn a medal in an indoor heptathlon as a Tar Heel. He talked to his team’s distance runners to discuss strategies.

By the 800-meter mark, Pierce knew he could finish the race first.

“It just came to me that I have to give it my all,” Pierce said. “This is my last indoor track meet ever, so I might as well go out as hard as I could and just try to hold on and see if I can get on the podium, and luckily, I did.”

Sophomore Cameron Overstreet, who set a personal record in her second-place pole vault finish, said Pierce’s heptathlon performance was the most inspiring Tar Heel performance at the meet.

“He’s been working for this for four years,” Overstreet said. “He’s always wanted to medal and to see him push through the 1,000, the last event, the last day, it was just an awesome race and he pushed so hard. That just kind of shows that he wanted it so bad, that he wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of stopping him.”

That desire to win is something Meaders expects from all of his athletes. He said he wasn’t concerned with what the other teams expected from UNC at the meet. Rather, he was concerned about what his athletes expected from themselves.

“We expect that we’re going to work hard,” Meaders said. “We’re going to challenge for championships every time we go out there.

“I think the kids are starting to change our culture a little bit. There’s a greater degree of personal responsibility. I think there’s a greater degree of determination, and that’s what we expect from ourselves. That’s what’s really important.”

Contact the desk editor at sports@dailytarheel.com.