Colorful dresses, bowties, oversized hats and kegs are just a few things that make up the Carolina Cup horse race held at College Park in Camden, S.C., every April. This year was no different, except that with the crackdown on alcohol enforcement at the event, police confiscated seven of the kegs brought by a group of UNCW students.

Who cares, right? Well, South Carolina’s The State newspaper seems to. Their article entitled “Hard drinking, hard lessons,” along with supplying statistics for the number of underage drinking arrests made, explains how the police confiscated seven kegs brought by a large group from UNCW. The kegs were taken because they weren’t registered in South Carolina, but they were supposed to be given back at the end of the day.

“Of course, there were thousands of people in the College Park section, and the vast majority of them came, celebrated and went home without problems. But the UNC-Wilmington group wasn’t among them,” the article says.

When it was time to leave, the UNCW group was unable to locate some of their kegs and “blamed the deputies for losing them.” The article also says that the students argued with deputies about not returning a keg that was in a friend’s name — who was passed out on the bus.

Out of all the universities that attended Carolina Cup, unfortunately UNCW has gotten the most unwanted press. And for alcohol, nonetheless. I personally did not attend Carolina Cup, but I’ve heard many different viewpoints on the issue. The majority of the people who attended seem to think that the newspaper blew the situation out of proportion, and that the UNCW group was one of the calmer groups that attended. They were just, unfortunately, not informed about the new rule to register kegs.

To be honest, I’m not really sure why this situation was deemed newsworthy. From the title of the story, I thought it was going to be entirely about the alcohol enforcement at the event; however, it was more about the “no unregistered kegs” rule and how UNCW students weren’t informed of this rule and got a little upset about it. I’m sure a lot more scandalous things happened at Carolina Cup, so why the need to focus on us?

Since the majority of people who attend Carolina Cup are members of fraternities and sororities, this ultimately reflects badly on UNCW Greek life. To use words such as “complaining,” “blaming” and “passed out” to describe a group of UNCW Greeks gives people a bad impression of fraternities and sororities on our campus. As a member of a Greek organization myself, I was a little embarrassed, and I wasn’t even at the event.

The whole article seems a little uncalled for. Most people are aware that college students only attend Carolina Cup to drink and socialize, and that’s exactly what the UNCW group came there to do. If the article was solely about the efforts to reduce underage drinking, fine. But this is an article that calls out a group of UNCW students for no reason that is worthy of publication. Whether the article is completely accurate or the situation was blown out of proportion, it’s published for all to see, and now we can only hope that next year’s Carolina Cup is less dramatic for all Seahawks in attendance.