A win the Pirates can take home

Published 8:22 pm Tuesday, January 16, 2018

 

This week, the online magazine BuzzFeed posted a story about the most Instagrammed locations for each state in 2017. For those who aren’t familiar with Instagram, it’s another social media app that focuses on photos.

The results for all 50 states varies, but not by much. They fall into four categories: national parks or other popular outdoor places; sporting venues; tourist destinations; or universities.

So, for Alaska, the most Instagrammed place was Denali National Park and Preserve; for both California and Florida, Disneyland and Disney World were the most photographed. In Connecticut, it was the casino Mohegan Sun; the same went for Nevada — the Las Vegas strip.

Baseball has a presence in Georgia, at SunTrust Park, home base for the Atlanta Braves; at Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, in Illinois; and at Boston’s Fenway Park.

So, what is the most Instagrammed location in North Carolina in the year 2017? There are many potential locations from which to choose. There’s Grandfather Mountain and the beaches of the Outer Banks. There’s Ocracoke and Asheville’s Biltmore Estate, which hosts more than 1 million visitors every year. Bank of America where the Carolina Panthers make their home, and certainly University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Duke University are Instagrammed incessantly during basketball season.

If the guess was any of the above, that guess would be wrong.

The most Instagrammed place in North Carolina in 2017 was, in fact, East Carolina University, according to BuzzFeed.

ECU joins sports powerhouses such as University of Alabama, Michigan State, Iowa State, Indiana State and more on the list.

There’s no doubt that once a Pirate, always a Pirate, and ECU students and alumni have lots of school pride. So much pride, in fact, that more photos taken at ECU were posted to Instagram in 2017 than any other location in the state.

Any other place in the state — it’s an interesting achievement, to say the least. But for a school that suffered through a terrible football season and whose basketball coach bailed out mere weeks into the schedule, perhaps being the most Instagrammed site in North Carolina is one win Pirate fans can take home this year, while waiting for a better one, next year.