At the majority of colleges and universities across the nation, students take pride in wearing their school’s colors. It’s a way of showing pride in one’s institution and allegiance to being a student. At UNC Wilmington, students are encouraged to sport our primary color, teal.

Slogans such as “Feel My Teal” and “Team Teal” can be seen all around campus. UNCW has even dedicated the second day of the work week as “Teal Tuesday.” However, a recent look at our sports teams may show a slight loss of the school’s main color.

With 16 fielded varsity teams, many of them do not feature the color on several of their uniform combinations. Many coaches blame the school’s uniform maker Adidas for the lack of teal.

“Teal is still our primary color and we look to use it as much as we can,” women’s soccer coach Paul Cainey said. “Teal is not being de-emphasized, we simply need different colors sometimes to differentiate home and road uniforms.”

Both the women’s and men’s soccer teams wear white jerseys at home, and navy is their away color. Both of the uniforms are filled with little teal.

Head baseball coach Mark Scalf also works to use teal as much as possible. The baseball team has three different jerseys: one teal, one navy and gold and one white jersey.

“We use all three colored jerseys on the road in a three-game week series, and you don’t wear white on the road in baseball,” Scalf said.

This season, the men’s basketball team will be the switching from Adidas to Nike Jumpman brand uniforms for the first time. Despite the switch, the jerseys will actually include less teal than previous seasons as the team reverts back to white home uniforms and navy on the road. The last time the men’s team wore teal uniforms for away games was during the 2009-10 season.

The team will again wear “UNCW” across the chest instead of “Seahawks,” expanding the possible rebranding of the university’s sports teams.