CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — The pitch that ended North Carolina’s 2025 season found Carter French frozen in the batter’s box. Tony Pluta, Arizona’s closer with a streak that stretched back to April 1 without a run allowed, threw the pitch, and French swung through it. Season over. Boshamer Stadium emptied. It took 364 days, the same building, and the same kind of stakes — team trailing by one, two outs in the ninth, everything available to lose — for French to find out what kind of player he had become since then.
On Sunday, he singled through the right side. The run that scored when he did gave North Carolina a 4-3 walk-off victory over Southern California in a winner-take-all Game 3 and put the Tar Heels on a plane to Omaha, Nebraska, for the 13th time in program history.
French entered Sunday as a defensive replacement in the eighth inning. He hadn’t batted. When Cooper Nicholson drew a one-out walk with North Carolina trailing 3-2 in the ninth, French stepped to the plate cold.
USC’s Adam Troy had been effective after taking over in relief. He got behind French 3-0, then 3-1. The Trojans pulled him for Chase Herrell. On the next pitch, French put the barrel on it and drove the ball into right, moving Nicholson from first to third. Jake Schaffner’s sacrifice fly brought in the tying run. Gavin Gallaher walked. Owen Hull — who had spent the afternoon punishing USC pitching to the tune of three doubles — lifted a drive to center that USC’s Kevin Takeuchi could not reach. The ball dropped. French scored. The scoreboard read 4-3 and the celebration was already under way before the throw came in.
“That’s one of the most special games I’ve been a part of at Boshamer Stadium,” head coach Scott Forbes told reporters after the game.
The Tar Heels will play Ole Miss in the opening round of the College World Series, which begins June 12 at Charles Schwab Field in Omaha.
The French storyline runs deeper than Sunday. He walked on at UNC and spent two and a half years in the program before earning a starting job in the outfield late in his junior season. By the time the 2025 postseason arrived, he had become a weapon — a .400 hitter across seven tournament games, a plus defender in left, a senior with one year left to make his presence mean something. In Game 3 of last year’s Super Regional against Arizona, he had been part of the early push that gave UNC a 3-1 lead. The Wildcats answered with three in the eighth to take a 4-3 lead and held on. In the ninth, Pluta struck French out to end the Tar Heels’ season, recording his 14th save of the year, a school record at Arizona.
French was the final out of the year.
Sunday’s game followed a different arc, though it pointed in the same direction through eight innings. Freshman starter Caden Glauber was outstanding — 7.1 innings, three runs, a career-high 11 strikeouts — but USC’s Andrew Johnson matched him pitch for pitch, limiting North Carolina to a single run on 99 pitches over 7.2 innings. Takeuchi and Andrew Lamb had broken a 1-1 tie with back-to-back solo home runs in the fourth and fifth. Going into the bottom of the eighth, the Trojans led 3-1. Hull pulled UNC within one with a double, but Troy struck out the side to kill the rally. Carolina was two outs from elimination.
Tyler Howe grounded out to open the ninth. Nicholson worked the walk that started everything. French’s single put the go-ahead run 90 feet away. Schaffner’s sacrifice fly made it 3-3. A walk to Gallaher, and then Hull again — to center, the ball finding the gap before Takeuchi could get there.
North Carolina finished the regular season 48-11-1, winning the ACC regular season title and reaching the conference championship game before falling to Georgia Tech. The Tar Heels entered the postseason as the No. 5 national seed in the NCAA Tournament. USC closed at 47-16, having won the College Station Regional by outscoring opponents 55-14 across five games. The Trojans hadn’t been to the College World Series since 2001 and came within two outs of getting there.
The question USC will sit with is where the ninth inning slipped away. Troy had been good. Getting behind French 3-0 was the moment the balance shifted, and the decision to pull him for Herrell may have been correct by the numbers without changing the outcome. French hit a pitch he was ready to hit. At some point in the ninth, the baseball simply left USC’s hands, and nothing that followed was going to bring it back.
For North Carolina, this is the second CWS trip in three years — the ninth since 2006 — and the second time Forbes has taken a team to Omaha that nobody expected to find an extra run when it mattered most. It marks the 20th consecutive Men’s College World Series in which an ACC program has placed a team in Omaha. Whether Forbes spoke with French about last June, about the 364 days between the Arizona strikeout and Sunday’s single, is not known. It did not come up at the postgame podium. It may not need to. The answer was in the box score before the ink dried.
