To avoid assigning duplicate hood linings to colleges and universities that used the same school colors, the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) used different types of heraldic patterns to divide the two or more colors in an academic hood. One of the heraldic divisions the Bureau employed was the “tri-chevron”, where three differently colored thin chevrons are placed side-by-side so that the hood lining does not show between them. Another heraldic division was the “reversed chevron”, where a chevron of standard width (four to five inches) was inverted so that the chevron pointed upwards.

The IBAC must have assigned the Free Will Baptist College a hood lining in the late 1940s or 1950s. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described the college’s hood lining as blue with a white reversed chevron, which was also how it was described in an IBAC list from 1972. The Bureau typically used “blue” to describe a medium shade of “true blue”, and this hood lining pattern was a recycling of the hood lining the IBAC had assigned to Eastman Business College in the 1910s or 1920s (blue with a white reversed chevron) before the college went defunct in 1931. The Intercollegiate Bureau also assigned Hampton University a similar hood lining pattern in the late 1940s or 1950, so avoid confusion, here Welch has been reassigned a reversed tri-chevron: two inverted white chevrons with the college’s new gold color between them.