Mike Fox led the North Carolina Wesleyan College (1983-1998) baseball program for fifteen seasons. He led the Battling Bishops to 14 NCAA Tournament appearances, eight trips to the Division III College World Series and the 1989 national championship. His teams posted 15 consecutive top-20 finishes and won 11 Dixie Conference Championships.
His record of 539-141-4 at Wesleyan ranked second in winning percentage (.791) among all active Division III head coaches.
Fox played second base for the North Carolina Tar Heels from 1976-78, helping UNC advance to the 1978 College World Series, where UNC tied for third. As a senior, he hit .277, tied for the team lead with six home runs and was named to the CWS All-Tournament team. Fox played on the UNC junior varsity basketball team under Eddie Fogler in the 1975 and 1976 seasons.
Fox has two degrees from UNC – he earned his undergraduate degree in physical education in 1978 and a master’s in teaching a year later. He began his coaching career as a graduate assistant coach at Carolina in 1979 and had his first head coaching job at Millbrook High School in Raleigh in 1980 and ’81. He was named head coach at Wesleyan in September 1982. He added athletic director’s duties in 1985.
The ABCA selected Fox as the Division III National Coach of the Year in 1989 after leading the Battling Bishops to the national title. He was the NCAA South Region Coach of the Year and Dixie Conference Coach of the Year seven times each and coached 29 All-Americas Wesleyan, where 92 percent of his players earned their degrees.
The 1974 graduate of East Mecklenburg High School in Charlotte, N.C., played independent professional baseball for one year.
Fox and his wife of 34 years, Cheryl, have a son, Matthew (31), a daughter, Morgan Pearce (28), son-in-law Tyler Pearce, and are grandparents to Morgan and Tyler’s son, Lincoln.Â
Leaving the Battling Bishops to return to his alma mater as the head baseball coach at North Carolina in 1999, Fox went on to have a storied career in Chapel Hill where he played or coached in every UNC CWS appearance up until 2024 where N.C. Wesleyan alumnus Scott Forbes led the Tar Heels to Omaha.
Fox was 948-406-1 in 22Â seasons at Carolina. He has 168Â more wins than any coach in Carolina Baseball history and has led the Tar Heels to seven of their 11 appearances in the College World Series, finishing second in the nation in 2006 and 2007. His teams also advanced to Omaha in 2008 and 2009, becoming the first school in Atlantic Coast Conference history to play in the College World Series four consecutive seasons. The Tar Heels went back to Omaha three more times in 2010s, winning Super Regionals in 2011, 2013 and again in 2018.
Under Fox, Carolina has won the ACC Tournament in 2007, 2013 and 2019 and finished first in the ACC Coastal Division seven times (2006, 2007, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2017 and 2018).
He was Baseball America’s National Coach of the Year in 2008, is a three-time Atlantic Region Coach of the Year (an award chosen by his peers in the American Baseball Coaches Association) and was the ACC Coach of the Year in 2018.
Inducted in the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame in 2017, Fox has led his teams to NCAA Tournament play in 32 of his 36 seasons as a head coach, including 15 trips to the NCAA Division I and Division III World Series. Sixteen of Carolina’s 18 College World Series wins have come under Fox’s direction in the last 14 years, and he played in UNC’s two other CWS wins in 1978.
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