Beating the dead horse!

I just received this from the Greensboro News & Record sports editor. Maybe Mr. P would like to enlighten him.

Hi,

Thanks for sending your e-mail.

I hope we do the right thing, but I'm awfully confused by UNC Charlotte's identity right now, and it appears the university may be also. The name of the university is UNC Charlotte. It says so at www.uncc.edu, in fact. The school or athletics department's insistence on using "Charlotte" for athletics teams is not only a different name than the one given the university but was awfully confusing, for example, on sports tickers when the Hornets were in town and will be again when the Bobcats are there. I can understand "Charlotte" as a shortened name on second reference, such as "Carolina" as short for North Carolina or "A&T" for N.C. A&T State University. (Although in our case here, "Greensboro" is the name of Greensboro College, so when out-of-town writers refer to UNC Greensboro as "Greensboro," they're flat wrong and uninformed; it's UNCG). But for the university in Charlotte to say "we're going by UNC Charlotte if you're talking about academics but we're the Charlotte 49ers if it's our sports teams" is extremely confusing to even the most intelligent of sports fans. This wasn't confusing before they attempted to change the name, and I can't imagine the logic behind doing so. To my knowledge, I've never heard anyone in sports broadcasting or journalism confuse UNC, UNCG, UNCC, UNCA or UNCW. People know each of those fines universities.

I haven't come across many university name changes in the time I've been in sports. I think the least-confusing policy for us to is to refer to a university and its teams by their given names.

Thanks for taking time to write,

Eddie Wooten, sports editor
News & Record
200 East Market Street
Greensboro, NC 27420
Desk: (800) 553-6880, extension 7093, or (336) 373-7093
Fax: (336) 373-7067
E-mail: [email protected]
Internet: www.news-record.com

 

can't argue with that...the best solution is for our retard administrators/board to change the name of our school to UC or CU and end the politics of it all. Cant wait for Woodward to retire so someone with some balls is leading our school. Preferably a Charlotte alum. A couple Charlotte alum in our athletic department wouldn't hurt either.

 

Not quite, read the post, think about it for two seconds, and there you go. School =UNC Charlotte, Charlotte = sports. NOT THAT DAMN HARD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

He left out UNC Chapel Hill, but he lost me when he mentioned the UNC system. If that school in Chapel Hill is called North Carolina, then we are Charlotte! I do not see a difference.

 

How about the University of Mississippi being called Ole Miss, or The University of Cal at Berkley being called Cal, or...

 

Well, since UNC was the only UNC for 136 years, there was not much need for the -CH identifier.

How often do y'all complain about this mater?

 

irrelevant. try again.
The Greensboro editor's reasoning/logic was flawed. If you go by official school names, Chapel Hill needs a hyphen qualifier. Charlotte is the name of our program, not UNC Charlotte. just as Ole Miss is not Mississippi, and you are North Carolina, not UNC-Chapel Hill and Berkely and the others mentioned above.

 

vp, the sad part of the entire discussion is that the GN&R will pick up the AP wire stories on the 49ers the remainder of the season and they will be referred to as Charlotte, not NC Charlotte, UNCC, etc. The editor won't admit to that.

And his counterparts at the High Point Enterprise have conssistently referred to them as Charlotte since the name change (although when the university is mentioned in a news story, the UNC-C has reappeared). I think that problem has been cured since the assistant editor's son in in the pep band now.

 

No, it's not irrelevant. The reason why so many people refer to UNC-CH as UNC, North Carolina, or simply Carolina is that for so long that is what we were The University of North Carolina - there was no UNC system. We were it. So those names continue to be widely used.

Berkely is, I think, similar to the UNC example. It was the Univeristy of California, until there was a Cal system.

 

Mr. Wooten,
In response to your email which was subsequently posted on a message board. I think it's only fair that you begin calling UNC-Chapel Hill by that name rather than North Carolina. Ole Miss should also be referred to as Missisippi only. I don't have time to pull up every sports program in the country that markets their teams as a different name than their official university name but I hope you will get my point. Everyone else in the country can get it right. It's a shame that sports editors in Greensboro still can't get it together.
Niner Mike