Football traditions in North Carolina September 08 2026

Break out the spirit wear

Here, football is both a culture and a sport. I love the color combinations, the mascots, the superstitions. I love that fans can paint their faces and dress up, yell and scream, camp outside for hours beforehand eating junk food and blasting music, and all of this is completely normal! One of my favorite football oddities? Spirit wear. Not a screen printed t-shirt or a team jersey, but the one-of-a-kind spirit wear handmade from pure excitement.

Luckily for me, puff paint was at the height of its popularity in the early 2000’s when I was in high school. That stuff was magic. I can still picture the exact aisle in Ben Franklin Crafts lined with every color you can imagine in tiny little bottles fixed with peeling yellow price tags. If there was an occasion, you better believe my friends and I painted a shirt to celebrate it. We made them for birthdays, senior week, and game days. We painted pillowcases for band trips and sleepovers. But for football … we painted jeans. Spirit jeans. We took so much time perfecting them and couldn’t wait for game day to wear them. Going through old boxes last year, I found mine and sent a picture to my best friend since the age of ten. “What do I do with these?!” I asked. She had recently purchased her childhood home and was in the process of fixing things up. She replied, “I don’t know. I still have mine too.” Just like that, we’re 16 again, meeting at the stoplight to follow each other to school in our puff paint shirts.

I think sports, especially football, bring us back to our teenage years. That’s when sports really mattered. Whether you were playing, cheering, or spectating, attending a game with your friends was especially magical. Nowadays, we remember our glory days while watching our kids live their own. My spirit wear is a soccer mom shirt and I swapped puff paint for a vinyl cutter, but deep down, it’s still teenage me, excited for game day with my friends. Even if my current friends are half my size and constantly ask for snacks.