Meet the students trying to get 10 Tar Heel feet painted on Chapel Hill's roads

After UNC beat Georgetown University to win the NCAA Tournament in 1982, the Town of Chapel Hill celebrated the victory by painting massive Tar Heel feet on major roads leading into campus. Almost 37 years later, a group of UNC students is working on a campaign called "Home is Where the Heels Are" to bring 10 Tar Heel feet back to Chapel Hill’s streets.

Project leader Abbie Ashford, a junior in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media and a former DTH staffer, said the feet will be a renewed representation of Carolina pride.

“We kind of want it to be focused on everything about UNC and how great UNC is, rather than just athletics, because UNC encompasses more than that." Ashford said. "We’ve got some of the greatest minds in the world going to school here, and we just want to celebrate how much everyone identifies as a Tar Heel fan, even beyond their time at Carolina.”

Ashford said there are 55 students working on the campaign, and all of them are enrolled in the course MEJO 477 New Media Technologies: Their Impact on the Future of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations. She said the class is divided into five subgroups: a strategy team, a creative team, a video team, a PR and communications team and a social media team.

Junior Caroline Moore is the project’s head of social media. She said her team is making a comprehensive effort on almost every platform that exists.

“We’re really trying to appeal to everyone,” Moore said. “Each platform is going to have a completely different voice than another based on who uses them and all of that.”

Junior Youssef Gobran, head of the video team, said his team wants to tell the story of the 1982 Tar Heel feet in a way that resonates with current students. He said videos are one of the fastest and easiest ways for people to understand their mission.

“Personally, I think that visual storytelling is one of the most fun ways of telling a story and one of the most fun ways of receiving a story,” Gobran said. “I’m a huge fan of TV and movies and stuff, and I think that rather than having people read and stuff, I think video is a very good, centralized 'Here’s what we’re doing.'”

The campaign will entail gathering the signatures of students and community members for a petition that will demonstrate broad community support for the project, Ashford said. On Dec. 1, the team will deliver the petition to local and regional leaders.

Ashford said the team hopes to slow down its campaign efforts toward the end of November, but hopes the project will be implemented in the next few years. She does not anticipate much opposition since the same project was carried out in 1982, and the feet were only erased because the highway was expanded.

“It just really depends on how much people stand behind our campaign and fight along with us to help this become a thing again,” Ashford said.

Moore said the students involved see the campaign as more than just a class project.

“We see this as a real opportunity to have something really cool come back to campus,” Moore said. “So we are doing what we can to work with policy makers and Chapel Hill to see who we can talk to and make this an actual thing.”

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