MERCH DROP

Preparing during Duke Football Bye-Week 10/21

Equipment Room

The equipment room is piled high with gear in cubbies and industrial-sized washing machines (only for gear, not for personal clothes). At the beginning of the season and at different points during the season, gear is distributed by number into each player’s cubby. The rightmost wall has Chris’s desk and on top displays all the helmets from the recently played bowl games and a helmet for each of the teams in the ACC conference. After each game, the Duke football team trades a helmet with the opposing team.

Players get to keep the travel uniform kits only after the season is over and also decide which decals go on their helmets for each game. The decals are stickers kept in a cabinet between the laundry area and the equipment aisles. We also learned that at home, the football team wears solid colors.

Each player has a laundry loop strap that coincides with their locker number to keep their laundry items together. Next to the equipment room is more storage shared with the nutrition department that has shoes air-drying (of which you could smell a lingering odor of the sweat) and is long in depth with many, many cases of Gatorade products with weekly shipment delivered.

On October 21st, we spent our day of fieldwork in the equipment room, distributing and labelling player gear for an upcoming merch drop. There is a staff of over 50 that takes care the of equipment alone, to give you a sense of the quantity of the process. Each player had to have sneakers, a beanie, and a hoodie labelled and distributed to them through their locker system.

The process itself is almost choreographed. Woolset climbs the ladder to pull down stacks of merch from the high shelves all tucked away in an order that is second nature to the staff but likely alien to the players. For the highest cubbies, Woolsey uses a ladder, but sometimes will just climb up if he’s feeling “squirrelly.” From there, everything gets stickered and sharpied with the player locker numbers. Locker numbers are grouped by position, which makes it easier for the equipment team to keep track of who needs what and where things should go during distribution. The labeling becomes its own kind of repetitive rhythm. The assembly line passes shoes, beanies, and hoodies through a system of sharpies.

Stickers on Sneakers

The players will be granted the sneakers if they make it to the Bowl Game.

The shoes represent a promise, a prize, an investment, and a hope for the future of the success of the program.

Beanie labels

The process that makes photos like these possible (@dukefootball on Instagram).

Unpackaging Sweatshirts

The hoodies were folded and packaged in plastic. Each one glided out of it's wrap smoothly.

Image above provided by Gemiyal Allen (pictured left).

"The equipment staff’s work embodies a kind of quiet expertise that is both technical and emotional. Their precision is born not from external oversight but from internalized standards; this first strikes me as a subtle manifestation of Foucauldian discipline. Yet this discipline is not coercive but somewhat cooperative. The staff participate willingly in the creation of order, finding pride in the exactness of their craft." – Peikun Shi

Reflection on capturing the merch drop via video by Maddie Morrison:

In the actual moment, I was focused on doing things right and not getting in the way. But rewatching the videos taken during our work, I started noticing the quieter details. Clarke's quiet jokes and conversation starters, Chris' fatherly explanations and agile movements, and Dustin always being in the right place at the right time with repetitive motions that kept the process flowing. Distribution of merch is something the team does all the time, but seeing it from different angles made it feel like its own little world inside the equipment room, especially in the anticipation of the next game after a win.

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