A True Team Player

Help Desk Manager, Porschia Holmes, brings an attitude of teamwork to the School and to the gridiron

Story by Ryan McDaniel | Published January 30, 2024

Porschia Holmes recently returned from a weekend in Florida. But this weekend was not sun, sand, and surf. More like run, hit, and turf. She was competing in a flag football tournament, and she stayed incredibly busy all weekend, playing thirteen games on five different teams.

This volume of play is not unusual for Porschia. “Let’s say I do three formats in a tournament,” she estimates. “I definitely do a tournament at least once or twice a month. So, I’ll say about 10 games a month.” The “formats” Porschia refers to are the on-field team size; five, seven, or eight players and either all-women or co-ed. The five-person format will make its Olympics debut at the 2028 games in Los Angeles.

Porschia, now the Help Desk Manager for Information and Educational Technology (IET) at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, has been playing football off and on for over twenty years. It started in Hollywood, Florida, where Porschia went to high school and played for two years. In college, her athletics focus shifted away from football when she earned a basketball scholarship to NC Central, where she also ran track and cross country. At Central, Porschia majored in Business Administration with a concentration in computer science, graduating in 2006.

After college, Porschia continued to play basketball in a semi-pro league. That’s where she began to get back into football. “Some of my teammates played flag football,” she remembers. “And they would ask, ‘come play flag with us!’”

That was around 2009. About two years later, Porschia was not just playing flag football, but also tackle football. Her talents were not just taking her around the country, but through the many positions on the team. “I would say wide receiver is my favorite because I like to get the ball fast and go about my business,” Porschia says. (She also happens to be nationally-ranked as a wide receiver in the flag football circuit.) “On defense, I like to play safety because I can see everything and steal the ball . . . I don’t really like pulling flags, so I try to get to the ball before it comes to that situation.”

Though not her favorite, Porschia also plays quarterback a lot – she draws parallels between playing QB and her role as point guard on her basketball teams. Porschia also plays running back, a position she was playing during one of her favorite football memories. “In the 2013 Tackle Football Championship, we were playing in Texas against the number one team,” she recalls. “After two false-start penalties in a row, I was lined up in our own endzone. The quarterback [now an Assistant RB Coach in the NFL] handed me the ball and I ran it all the way back.” They went on to win the game, 14-0. (Watch the clip here – Porschia is on the team in black, number 12.)

In 2014, Porschia’s football career faced a setback when she tore her ACL. “I was traumatized because I’d made it through high school and college basketball with no ACL injury. I thought that was the time when these injuries always seem to happen,” she reflects.

That same year, Porschia joined the IET Team at the School of Pharmacy. For the last ten years, she has been a front-line technician, troubleshooting everything from laptops, to printers, to lab equipment. She brings a relaxed, confident demeanor to work, showing equal patience with difficult tech problems and peoples’ frustrations over them. She recently began a newly-created role as Help Desk Manager for IET, where she will not only work with faculty and staff to solve their technical problems, but train others to deliver the same exceptional service.

After over a year of frustratingly-slow healing, Porschia was back on the field. She continued to play tackle football until 2017, when she shifted solely to flag football formats. Most recently, her focus has shifted again, this time away from playing. “I have been trying not to play as much,” she says. “I want to teach it – to coach. I’ve always coached my teammates on the field anyways, so it’s natural – it’s easy.”

Porschia is already leaning into coaching. She currently coaches girl’s basketball at Cardinal Gibbons High School in Raleigh, as well as girl’s flag football. The flag football team recently played their first weekend of games, going 3-0.

Whether playing or coaching, Porschia participates because of the people she gets to be with. “I like the team aspect of it,” she explains. “Understanding everybody and how things move and how we can help each other get to the ultimate goal.”

Watch Porschia’s full-field touchdown run: