Arizona: Will Dancy
(Note: THI is naming the greatest former UNC football or basketball player from each of the 50 states. The criteria is the player had to live in the state he represents at some point before arriving at UNC. The duration doesn’t matter, he just had to live there. College and pro careers were factored with a lean toward their UNC accomplishments.)
Will Dancy grew up in Graham, NC, and attended Southern Alamance High School, but before he arrived at North Carolina, Dancy spent a year at Eastern Arizona College in Thatcher, AZ. And with former football player Jamal Womble the only other player we could find who went to UNC, Dancy became the Arizona representative.
It was there where Dancy refined his skills and earned a scholarship to UNC, so his year in Arizona is very important to him getting to Chapel Hill and his career. Dancy was an all-conference performer as a true freshman at Eastern Arizona before committing to UNC in March of 2013 and arriving in Chapel Hill later that summer.
He played in 10 games as a sophomore at UNC in 2013 and in all 13 games in 2014, starting twice in Carolina’s wins over Liberty and San Diego State. Dancy suffered an Achilles injury and missed the entire 2015 season but was able to redshirt since he hadn’t sat out a season at any level of college to that point.
Dancy participated in spring practices at UNC in 2016 and rumors began to swirl he was transferring to Missouri. He was enrolled at UNC for the first summer session a few months later before transferring to East Carolina as a graduate student. He was eligible to play right away for the Pirates.
Dancy was well traveled. He attended Hargrave Military Academy after leaving Southern Alamance and enrolled in the spring of 2012 at Iowa Western Community College but spent just one semester there.
He then moved on to Eastern Arizona before signing with Memphis, but Dancy later was granted a release of that letter of intent and ended up at UNC.
Dancy earned his degree from Carolina before moving on to ECU and held no ill will toward the program or school, it just didn’t work out in the end.
”It’s a great university at North Carolina and I have a degree from there,” Dancy told the North State Journal. “But it just wasn’t a good fit for me there.”
Dancy played a couple of seasons with the now-defunct High Country Grizzlies, a low-level arena football team that participated in multiple leagues. He’s currently a Technical Recruiter at Kforce Inc in Charlotte.