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It’s not exactly clear what unfroze relations between the two schools. It may have had something to do with the growing enthusiasm at Trinity to resume football — a long battle that finally led to a resumption of the sport in 1920 — and renewal of the Trinity-UNC rivalry in 1922.

But the first major break in the athletic freeze came in the spring of 1919, when UNC traveled to East Durham for a baseball showdown with Trinity. It was the first major athletic competition between the two schools in 21 years — and ended with a dramatic anti-climax when the two nines battled to a 15-inning, 0-0 tie. A week later, UNC squeezed out a 3-2 victory on a muddy field in East Durham to strike the first blow in the rivalry of the 20th Century.

Trinity started its basketball team under volunteer coach Wilbur Wade “Cap” Card, who got his nickname as captain of the Trinity baseball team. As a grad student at Harvard, Card had met Dr. James Naismith, who invented the game of “Basket Ball” at the YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts, and spread it to other Y’s across the Northeast and eventually into the South and Midwest.

Dr. James Naismith Invented "Basket Ball"

Card had been an aspiring minister but instead became a basketball disciple of Dr. Naismith. When he was hired by Trinity as a physical education teacher, he first started teams in track and field, gymnastics, bowling, swimming, fencing and volleyball. That was before Card had ever met and befriended Richard “Red” Crozier, his counterpart at Wake Forest College who had formed the first collegiate basketball team in North Carolina in 1905 and played against local YMCA teams, the only opponents he could find made up mostly of post-graduates that had taken up the sport.

Crozier had envisioned the same kind of intercollegiate basketball competition that linked schools on what would become Tobacco Road — UNC, N.C. State, Methodist Trinity and small, Baptist Wake Forest located in northern Wake County — mainly football and baseball. His inquiries first led him to Cap Card at Trinity, who by then had all his other teams going and agreed to form a basketball team but demanded three weeks to train his recruits most of whom had never played the new sport.

Trinity Fielded First Team in 1906…

The delay cost Trinity a chance to be part of the South’s first college basketball game, as Crozier found a willing Guilford College squad to play in February, 1906. Crozier finally took his team to Durham on March 6 for the first game between schools that would eventually comprise the Big Four. Wake Forest defeated Trinity, 24-10, in the tiny Angier B. Duke Gymnasium, where the 32 x 50 playing floor was about third the size of what would become the standard college basketball court but about the same size as the original Springfield court where Dr. Naismith invented the game. The teams played again two weeks later at Wake Forest with the same result.

...And Played in Tiny Angier B. Duke Gym; It is still on East Campus and is Called The Ark

Trinity had to wait until the following season to earn its first intercollegiate victory, 24-1 over Guilford college. Card’s teams would lose six straight to Crozier’s Baptists before finally breaking through in 1909 with a 22-14 win. Trinity lost the rematch 30-5, but was on its way to an 8-1 season, Card’s best record as a basketball coach.

Wilbur "Cap" Card Was Trinity's First Coach After Learning the Game From Dr. Naismith

In 1912, after coaching the Trinity team for seven years without a stipend, Card stepped down and Trinity hired former player “Big Jennie” Brinn as its first paid basketball coach. Brinn stayed one season, when his younger brother Claude served as team captain, and then came Noble Clay for two years and the Doak brothers (Bob and Chick) for three. Henry P. Cole, a sophomore, was the school’s only playing coach in 1919. Men named Walter Rosenthies, Floyd Egan, James Baldwin and Jesse Burbage followed for one or two seasons.

Carolina Fielded its First Team in 1911; Marvin Ritch (holding ball) was Captain

By then, Carolina had turned its intramural basketball program into a varsity sport after some students who had played in the advanced YMCA leagues of Charlotte and Durham approached the UNC administration. The most persuasive was a student named Marvin Ritch, who not surprisingly would go on to be a prominent attorney in the state after graduating from Chapel Hill.

Nate Cartmell, who was Carolina’s track coach, took on the extra duty of starting up a basketball team. He had played the round ball sport while in school at Penn and knew a little about the game. Cartmell held open tryouts in Bynum Hall, which doubled as a gymnasium, hosted dances and other social events and later became the bursar’s building.

Unlike the more intimate Angier B. Duke Gym on Duke’s East campus, expansive Bynum Hall had an upstairs track and was so chilly that the temperature inside was often no warmer than the winter weather outdoors. No wonder that the first Carolina games attracted a few loyal fans but mostly stragglers who stopped in to see where all the noise was coming from.

Tar Heels Played in "cold" Bynum Gymnasium, Which is Now Bynum Hall on the UNC Campus

They found little to get excited about. Early basketball barely resembled today’s high velocity game, and Carolina’s first teams were not very big, failing to score as many as 20 points 11 times in its first three seasons, mainly because a center jump followed each made basket and the Tar Heels could never seem to get the ball with regularity. It took 12 years and some taller players before they averaged 35 points a game.

With Trinity still refusing to schedule UNC, the Tar Heels’ biggest rival in those days was also from Durham — the local YMCA team that featured some of the best players in the area who found their way to Chapel Hill. In fact, in Carolina’s second game ever, the team made up mostly of “Y” kids scored 60 points against a small leftover squad at the YMCA in Durham. It would be seven years before another UNC team scored that many points.

Meanwhile, eight miles away, Trinity was catching on to the game after suffering through each of its first five seasons scoring in single figures at least one time — losing to Crozier’s burlier Wake Forest team by the excruciating scores of 15-5, 8-6, 22-5 and 30-5. They finally broke into double digits for good the year UNC fielded its first team. Once Card stepped down, their schedule grew to about 20 games, almost third of which were against various YMCA teams from North and South Carolina.

Trinity actually had 10 head coaches in the 20 years since “Cap” Card pioneered the program. Even while the two schools weren’t playing against each other, an incestuous oddity linked them. Bob Doak coached Trinity in 1916, the same season his brother Charles (“Chick”) led the Tar Heel team to its most wins ever (12) and its first undefeated season at home (6-0). Chick Doak then succeeded his brother at Trinity, becoming the only man to ever coach both schools’ basketball teams.

Chick Doak’s two seasons did produce UNC’s best player to date, Giles Mebane “Meb” Long of Charlotte, who set early single-season (249) and single-game (29) scoring records at Carolina. Long was named all-state and also led the South Atlantic Intercollegiate Athletic Association (SAIAA) in points scored. He played every game his senior season — except the last against Guilford College because Long was traveling with the UNC Glee Club, his other extracurricular activity.

Including Howell Peacock, who lasted three seasons, Carolina had seven coaches in its first 19 years of basketball, but that also included the 1922 and ’23 seasons when the team had no coach and still won 30 of 37 games while capturing the Southern Conference tournament championship and regular season title as a new member of the sprawling league.

The 17 coaches in their combined first 36 seasons of basketball shows how relatively insignificant the sport was at both schools, which would eventually have Hall of Fame coaches who each served for more than 30 years, Dean Smith and Mike Krzyzewski.

When UNC briefly passed Kentucky in all-time victories in 1995, Smith joked that many of those wins came against the Durham YMCA. However, those teams regularly provided the stiffest competition for the Tar Heels in their early years of basketball while the more experienced Methodists of Trinity had their way with the “Y” teams most of the time.

UNC's 1920 Team Was the First to Play Trinity; Legendary Alumnus Billy Carmichael Holds Ball

The year Trinity announced it was reinstating football, Carolina got on its basketball schedule for the first time. And that 1920 game, played on January 24 in the Angier Duke Gym (which still stands and is now known as the Ark), was won by the Tar Heels in stirring fashion, 36-25, behind their captain, a Catholic student from Durham named Billy Carmichael, who would go on to become a legendary figure at UNC and in its athletic history. Trinity was 6-0 and clearly favored, having had only one losing season in the prior decade while Carolina was still learning the sport and on its fourth head coach in 10 years.

Carmichael Made Headlines in First Trinity Game And Later Became Controller for UNC System

The first Trinity-UNC game attracted several hundred mostly-standing spectators in the same Angier Duke Gym where Trinity had played its first basketball game against Wake Forest 14 years earlier, but this contest was bigger news on both campuses. Carmichael made the headline and was featured prominently in the front-page story the next morning with a narrative that read: Twelve times out of 13 attempts Billy found the basket for foul shots. He also threw [in] numerous field goals that were extremely difficult.” An ironic oddity of the inauguration of the basketball rivalry was that Chick Doak, who had already coached both teams, was the official (only one ref was used until the 1940s).

In the rematch on March 1, a game rescheduled from February 20 because of an outbreak of influenza on the Trinity campus, the visiting team won again. Before another thousand fans at Bynum Gym in Chapel Hill, Trinity prevailed, 19-18, after staging the first great rally of the historic rivalry. Carolina led late 18-13, which was a seemingly insurmountable lead, before Trinity scored the last three baskets behind leading scorer William “Skin” Ferrell.

The schools attempted to schedule a third game to break the 1-1 tie, but influenza had become an epidemic throughout the South and much of the country (eventually killing more Americans than were lost in World War I). The rubber match was never played, and of course the Trinity and UNC fans argued over which had the better basketball team. Sound familiar?

For the next 90 years, Duke and Carolina would take turns beating each other on the road and vie for first place and the title in whatever league they were in.

In 1921, Carolina Defeated Flu-Laden Trinity And Won A "Mythical" State Championship

In 1921, the teams won on their home courts and tied for first in the mythical Big Five standings (Davidson, N.C. State, Trinity, UNC and Wake Forest), each finishing with a 3-2 record. The schools did arrange a “championship game” at the Raleigh Auditorium on Saturday, March 5.

Major "Fritz" Boye Coached Carolina in 1921, Then Went on to Become a Brigadier General

Bedridden by the lingering flu, Trinity coach Floyd Egan missed the game, witnessed by some 2,000 fans and his team that was fighting influenza lost the state title to the Tar Heels, 55-18. Led by Durham’s Cart Carmichael (Billy’s brother) and Charlotte’s Monk McDonald, UNC won its first basketball championship ever in Major Frederic Boye’s second and final year as coach. The West Point graduate and former captain of the Army basketball team had been with the ROTC program at UNC before the U.S. Military reassigned him to a post in Atlanta, where he would go on to attain the rank of Brigadier General in 1945.