Carolina Alumni Review - January/February 2007

or to dinner, the lights come on at Ehringhaus and Hooker fields, the gyms fill at Woollen and Fetzer and the pools populate at Bowman-Gray and Koury Natatorium. Seventeen hundred student-athletes of a different sort pull on their cleats, their tennis shoes or their Speedos and, for two or three hours, practice as they once did at childhood parks or on neighborhood streets, calling their own shots.

On the weekends, with no TV cameras or press boxes or NCAA presence looming in the wings, they compete against other universities while wearing Carolina colors, something most never dreamed of doing. Along the way, they learn to represent UNC within an organizational model that requires community service, fundraising and self-sustaining leadership, blending timeless life skills with old-fashioned athletic purpose.

And yes, they also win national championships.

Old sport, new outlook

When he was 11, Adrian Cummins made the Barbados national swim team.

Natural thing, to learn to swim when you grow up on an island, but Cummins and water had a relationship that transcended backstrokes and butterflies. In the off-season, to keep in shape, he and his teammates played water polo, and Cummins was so talented at that sport that he also made its junior national team three years later, then joined the Barbados national water polo team at age 15.

But when it came time to go to college, he wasn’t looking for a school where he could play water polo so much as he was looking for a different island. “My criterion was that I wanted to be two plane flights away from home,” he says. “I felt like I needed a change.”

Cummins had his eye on the East Coast — far, but not too far from home — even though virtually no varsity water polo teams existed from Maine to Florida. When he chose UNC, he figured he’d hang around Chapel Hill for two years, maybe compete for the varsity swim team and then transfer to a school that played varsity water polo for the remainder of his college career.

Then, two months after landing on

Virginia Ariail’s rugby teammates absorbed a rash of ACL injuries, and she dished out a broken nose. A three-sport player in high school, “I needed to find something to get involved with, to find that group. At a university this big, you need something to tie yourself in with other people.”

Adrian Cummins, opposite page, was an elite water polo player in Barbados and had to learn to ratchet back to just plain fun. He also learned that he had a lot of patience — and that maybe he’d be a good coach.