Born & Bred: A Grandfather's Foresight
Elizabeth Culton’s grandfather was instrumental in the beginning of Carolina women’s athletics, unknowingly paving the way for his granddaughter to one day excel.
By Adam Lucas, July 20, 2023
One of Elizabeth Culton’s earliest memories comes from a
University of North Carolina gymnastics meet.
“I have wanted to be a Carolina gymnast ever since I was eight or nine years old,” she says. “I would come to the meets growing up, and I vividly remember sitting in the stands watching them and wondering if I would be good enough to be a gymnast at Carolina. I genuinely didn’t know.”
There were two halves to that equation. Culton wanted to be a gymnast. She’d been doing gymnastics since she was little, eventually training at Bull City Gymnastics in Durham while she attended Jordan High and Trinity Academy.
The other half: Culton wanted to be a Tar Heel. Both her brothers attended Carolina. Her parents, Julian and Cathy, attended Carolina. It was a deep legacy but not necessarily an unusual one; once a family develops some Carolina blue traits, it tends to take over the entire family.
But Culton’s family tree was different, and had an even deeper Tar Heel tie. Her grandfather, Bill Cobey, was the UNC athletic director from 1976-80. Cobey had a decorated career that included serving as a United States Congressman, working in state government, and holding several political positions.
But he was best-known in Chapel Hill as the former athletic director at Carolina. Before taking over the head position, he had worked at Carolina since 1968. That included a role as assistant athletic director when Carolina established the first seven women’s varsity programs—including gymnastics—during the 1971-72 school year. Soon, with the adoption of Title IX, Cobey was appointed as Carolina’s Title IX officer.
“At that time, I don’t think in my wildest dreams I thought Carolina women’s athletics would develop into the program it is today,” Cobey said in 2022. “Certainly, we sought excellence, but what has happened has exceeded all expectations. We went about building women’s athletics with a purpose just as we had competed in men’s athletics. We wanted to be the best.”
Once he took over the head post, Cobey oversaw the football transition from Bill Dooley (who won the Atlantic Coast Conference title in 1977) to Dick Crum (who won the ACC title in 1980). In basketball, of course, he inherited a basketball coach named Dean Smith who was on the verge of building some of his most powerful teams. The 1977 squad is among the best in school history that didn’t win the national championship, and just as Cobey departed, the Tar Heels were about to make back-to-back national championship game appearances—falling short to Indiana in 1981 and winning in 1982.
But there’s no better Tar Heel credential than this one: Cobey is the athletic director who hired Anson Dorrance, who immediately set about making Carolina women’s soccer the greatest dynasty in college sports history and catapulted women’s soccer to the international stage.
Elizabeth Culton, of course, was over two decades from being born when her grandfather was serving as the Tar Heel athletic director. But in addition to laying the groundwork for her eventual success as a UNC gymnast, his tenure helped infuse the family even more deeply with Carolina passion; Elizabeth’s older brother is named Cobey.
“Carolina games were always on in our house,” she says. “I remember sitting in the living room watching them as early as seven or eight years old, and my brothers and family have always been big Tar Heel fans.”
Which made it even more special to watch Elizabeth embark on her decorated gymnastics career. She was the East Atlantic Gymnastics League Rookie of the Year in the Covid-shortened 2020 year, an All-American as a sophomore, the EAGL Scholar-Athlete of the Year as a junior, and—fittingly—an Athletic Director’s Scholar-Athlete Award selection as a senior.
She was part of the transition from longtime head coach Derek Galvin—who originally offered Culton the chance to be part of the program—to current head coach Danna Durante, who has guided the Tar Heels to an NCAA team regional berth two years in a row. And Culton is well aware that somewhere in Carmichael, there might have been a girl looking at her the same way she used to idolize the Tar Heel gymnasts.
“It’s amazing,” she says. “Sometimes I have to take a step back and recognize how amazing it is, because life is really busy. But when little girls ask for autographs or pictures, I absolutely see myself in them. It’s a really great feeling.”