Uniform Fiasco

My first post on this blog that I am excited to create. Many of the posts will be about how some of the operations work or neat stories. The first post goes way back to the CAA Championship Game this March. To set the stage..the CAA championship game was our 3rd game in three days. We have three uniforms too--a road purple, a home white and a home gold. We wore the white for the first game against William & Mary and wore the purple for our second game against Delaware. That means that we were left with the gold jersey. Being the road team for the championship game, we figured we could wear the gold jersey (since it's not white) and we wouldn't have to do laundry for the purple jerseys. This is where the problem began. We arrived at the Richmond Coliseum and handed out the gold jerseys to the team. They went out and warmed up for a good bit and then the refs came on to the court (they usually come to the court around the 30-minute mark pregame). The refs saw our gold jerseys and were quick to say that they were too close to white (which Northeastern was wearing) and that we would have to change. It is no surprise that the refs declared the gold jerseys too similar to white. It wouldn't be that big a deal that they needed to switch to the purple jerseys except for the fact that the jerseys were all in a bag in the hotel and were just crammed in the bag after the Delaware game all sweaty. You can see here how light the gold jerseys are:

Realizing we had to act quickly, myself, my fellow manager (Mike), our GAs (Kevin and Sam), and redshirt player (Dimitrije) sprinted back to the hotel through downtown Richmond in our suits in relatively warm weather. We told the bus driver so that she could meet us at the hotel and drive us back. We got to the hotel and swiftly ran to my room to get the jersey bag. The bus driver made it to the hotel and in the process of heading back to the Coliseum, we sorted the sweaty jerseys to match them with the shorts. It smelled pretty rank. We made it to the Coliseum with 15 minutes to spare and handed out the jerseys to the players and the rest is history. With the dirty jerseys JMU won its first CAA Championship in 19 years. Maybe it was the dirty jerseys, who knows. Maybe if we didn't wash them after the championship game and wore them dirty against Indiana in the second round of the tournament we would have won that game too. A true superstitious person will always wonder. Another funny aspect is that the players didn't know they were wearing dirty jerseys until after the game. Luckily it didn't make anybody sick!