Organizational Boundaries of UNC, Charlotte

¶ … UNC-CH as an organization, but its boundary is ambiguous. Propose a boundary which separates UNC-CH from its environment and defend this choice. How might a different boundary influence the paper?

One clear boundary established between UNC-CH and the rest of its environment is provided by its sports teams. Although sports fanaticism may vary from student to student on an individual level, it would be a rare student who would admit to being a Duke fan. Some students might adopt a studied indifference to sports, based upon a desire to separate themselves from the rest of the sports-mad student body. But overall, sports is a common, uniting issue that draws together most of the UNC campus. When teams, particularly basketball teams are doing well, there is a collective and unified excitement. Even when teams are not doing well, there is a protective sense of unity around the UNC brand.

Of course, the North Carolina community at large does contain some UNC fans. But overall, the affection of someone who is not a student or an alumnus does not have the same possessive fanaticism of a fan. That fandom might be diluted by interest in other professional sports, while the sense of identification with the success of one's college team is very personal and intimate. Furthermore, the community at large is also infiltrated by some fans that root for UNC's main rival Duke.

One question that often arises when discussing different teams is why some rivalries are so historic -- why do the Yankee fans hate the Red Sox fans so much and vice versa. The answer, of course, is that proximity breeds contempt. There exist few Syracuse or UConn fans of note in the outside Chapel Hill community but Duke's extreme closeness to UNC means that in the community at large, fans of the two schools walk side-by-side. This sense of infiltration causes students to be even more emphatic in how much they detest their lead, nearby rivals.

Sports rivalry, of course is 'healthy' for sustaining interest in the team (once again, the example of the Yankees and Red Sox arises, in terms of how they create extra 'buzz' for both teams when they play one another). UNC and Duke, while not always equally strong in the same years as basketball teams, are relatively equal programs in terms of their caliber although Duke might (in my incredibly biased opinion, quite unjustly) may be slightly more famous because of the legacy of its coach, Coach K.

To some degree, there is 'openness' in sports fandom in the sense that anyone can 'root' for the Tar Heels. Collectively rooting as an alumni or a member of the student body is still 'policed,' though, by access to tickets and also access to specific rituals, chants, and other aspects of the performance of fandom to which mere, casual fans are not privy. There is also a deep, emotional quality to the act of rooting for a college team that is difficult to replicate by an outsider. Outsiders wonder 'why do the students care so much,' even if they may be fans of the sport, and to them the act of being a fan of a university team seems like a strange, tribal practice rather than something they wish to emulate.