In California, a girls basketball team was disqualified, and reinstated after appeal, from their tournament because of illegal uniforms.  We were interested and then aghast after seeing the reason why.

Girls’ Basketball: Narbonne is Removed From Playoffs After Wearing Illegal Uniforms

These uniforms, saluting breast cancer awareness, earned this team a temporary suspension from a basketball tournament.

While there is a problem in sports in general with uniforms, this is not where the problem lies.  The problem is teams who wear uniforms with non-contrasting numbers which make them hard to read.  Such as wearing yellow on white, blue on black, blue on red, red on blue, etc.  What is worse is when a team wears the dominant jersey color over the same color, with a small piping.  In recent years, this has been common in college sports which has also filtered to high schools and younger.

Baylor used these uniforms in a game, while the BAYLOR was easily readable, you can see where trying to read the number or the players name was an issue.

While this may look cool up close, it can be a nightmare for anyone who needs to quickly identify a player or number.

The only sport that we’ve encountered that strictly enforces legible numbers is racing.  While we were announcing Florida Karting Association races, drivers were required to have highly readable numbers on their karts with contrasting colors.  Using red or black on white or yellow was perfectly ok as long as the placard could be read easily and from a distance.  While this may have changed or be different in other states, this rule made it much easier to follow the karts around the track and not lose track of someone.

The other issue with uniforms we have, numbers that look like other numbers.  Some fonts don’t allow much spacing in the number and there are some in which a 0 could also be a 2, 3, 5, 6, 8 or 9.  That’s seven different numbers all looking similar.  And the biggest problem with these fashion faux pas?  The parents and fans who get upset at the announcers for getting names wrong because we couldn’t easily read the numbers.

We are very much in favor of cool uniforms, but not at the expense of identification.