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ow, Breschi hopes Cloutier will channel that approach Saturday when UNC takes on Albany in the opening round of the NCAA tournament, but a deeper dive into Cloutier’s backstory reveals a complicated character.
The lefty grew up playing box lacrosse, and didn’t play much field lacrosse until he arrived at the Hill Academy as a junior in high school. The transition was pretty seamless, though, and Brodie Merrill, his head coach at the school, said it was because of Cloutier’s background in basketball, his second-favorite sport.
He’d barrel into defensemen, much like John Grant Jr., the player Cloutier said he idolized growing up, would. It’s something Breschi picked up on, too, as the Tar Heels play hoops once a week during the fall semester.
“I liken him to Charles Barkley, kind of that power forward type guy,” Breschi said. “That's the way he plays basketball and the way he plays lacrosse.”
The unavoidable truth about Cloutier, though, is that at 6-foot, 230 pounds, he is hefty. He loves his junk food — Wings Over Chapel Hill near UNC’s campus, pretty much anything with buffalo sauce. Cloutier and Patrick Merrill, Brodie’s brother and also a coach at the Hill Academy, can’t help but laugh when they recall one story.
During Cloutier’s senior year, he stayed with Patrick Merrill and his wife, a couple who Cloutier said is “super health conscious.” So they’d cook his meals, and one day at practice, Brodie mentioned to Patrick that it looked like “Clouts” wasn’t losing any weight. The reason?
“One day my wife went down to clean up his living area,” Patrick Merrill said. “She went to make his bed and underneath his pillows here chip wrappers and Cheez-Its and all this junk food. He was hiding it from us, which was pretty comical considering the fact he was 18 years old and we weren’t even his parents. He’s a hard guy to get mad at. He’s like a big teddy bear.”
Breschi shared a similar story, one that centers around an intra-squad competition the Tar Heels hold throughout the fall semester. They’re divided into six different teams and accumulate points for all sorts of events — like pick-up basketball, community service and earning a 3.0 GPA.
Cloutier’s team won, which meant Breschi hosted those players at his house for dinner. That’s when the blue-collar kid’s fun-loving personality came out.
“My wife and I, she makes her buffalo chicken dip, two trays of it,” Breschi said. “I think the other seven guys ate one tray and Clouts ate the whole tray of buffalo chicken dip before we had the steak dinner. … He's just a terrific kid.”