North Carolina Tar Heels: Everything Must Go
The North Carolina Tar Heels held a massive equipment sale that attracted lots and lots of customers.
The North Carolina Tar Heels had a strange event yesterday. They had a massive sale of old athletic equipment including jerseys, shoes, and other items. The sale attracted huge attention from fans and the curious alike.
The sale snuck up on me. My first notice that it was happening was when people began tweeting to Tre Boston about whether or not he wanted a jersey. That began a running twitter conversation about how they should have offered the equipment to the athletes first.
By that point it would have been too late to get to the sale. People were camped out the night before and the lines were consistently long the entire way through. While there were no limits on acquisitions at first, eventually they put limits on certain items.
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C.L. Brown of ESPN explained why jerseys could not end up in the hands of former athletes: “Normally items sold — such as jerseys, shoes and lacrosse sticks — get forwarded to the state’s surplus store because technically, at a public university, the equipment purchased is state property. That is why the Tar Heels didn’t just give the jerseys to the former players who used to wear them and it’s also why the university had to allow the public equal opportunity to purchase them.”
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So the sale became the hunting ground of the nostalgic, the needy, and the profit-seeking. Brown related several stories of high school coaches acquiring practice gear for their schools. Those were mixed in with people (including former players) who wanted a particular jersey (or any jersey at all) and people who were buying in bulk and likely to put the stuff on EBay in the near future.
Prices ranged from around $5 for socks to $50 for some shoes and the navy alternate football uniforms. There were good deals to be found for those that went. Athletic director Bubba Cunningham said that the school might have made $100,000 off the sale and the money would be put back into facilities for student-athletes.
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As neat as this was, it was not the biggest story to come out of Chapel Hill yesterday.