ECU Athletics will welcome adidas by July 1st

In a little over a month, boxes will flood the Ward Sports Building, filled with Adidas equipment and clothing as East Carolina athletics will officially switch to the three stripes brand from Nike July 1.

It has been a whirlwind half year in ECU’s equipment room since the announcement came down in early November of 2015. The equipment staff, headed by Matt Ater, director of equipment, hit the ground running and had to quickly send out orders and get things together for Adidas.

“They made the announcement November 4 and our first Adidas order was due November 17,” said Ater. “I think Adidas reps came in November 10, November 11 to show us products so we had basically less than a week to place our orders. It was a really quick turnaround to find budgets with our new contract.”

Ater said Adidas made an immediate impression with the assistance its representatives provided early on in the process.

Assistant equipment manager Jeff Oliver said some of the burden has also been lifted off the staff by ECU’s athletic department and administration from the get-go.

“The process has been made a little easier because everyone is on board,” Oliver said. “All the coaches, all the players, administration -- everybody is fully on board with Adidas. It has made it a lot easier as we’ve tried to move forward and place orders. Everybody wanted to look and see what they’ve got and everyone wanted to meet with the Adidas reps so it’s going to be a positive change.”

A major part of ECU’s switch to Adidas came with the Elite program tag given to the athletic department as one of the top-flight programs signed by Adidas. Ater said this gave them the opportunity to work with the “Portland group” at Adidas, which only works with the Elite programs.

Ater said it has been a fun process working with the Portland group. Initially, the equipment department sent ideas to the group and Adidas followed up with its own twist on what ECU had brought to the table.

“It’s neat seeing the benefits of the bigger budgets available to us and working with the Portland group,” Ater said. “There are just so many opportunities available to us that we didn’t have before.”

He said in the past, ECU had one representative for all sports in the past, but as an Elite program each sport has its own Adidas representative.

Oliver said Adidas was most excited by the unique nature of ECU athletics in many aspects. ECU is one of three Football Bowl Subdivision schools with purple and gold as primary colors (along with LSU and Washington). ECU is also the only “Pirate” mascot in FBS and Ater said Adidas has been excited to use the branding, saying specifically “No Quarter” and “Undaunted” were branding points Adidas representatives were intrigued by.

“One thing Adidas made very clear is they love our logo, they think it’s very distinct as it is,” Oliver said. “They want to kind of push us up into that upper echelon of their schools like Arizona State and Louisville and so on. They’re going to use our logo and our branding as part of that.”

ECU officially joins the Adidas brand July 1 after a 10-year stint with Nike beginning with a five-year contract in 2006-07.