Photo by Paul Martens Jay Sears (right) has worked at IU for 28 years, 22 of them as equipment manager for men’s sports. He is pictured here working with Mike Freitag, men's assistant soccer coach, preparing for the soccer season.

Athletes aren’t the only people working up a sweat at IU’s Assembly Hall in Bloomington. While collegiate athletic events are sheer entertainment for sports fans, the fun and games represent serious work for Jay Sears and Rusty Stillions, equipment managers of men’s and women’s Olympic sports, respectively. With days that might run from 6 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., Sears and Stillions are responsible for providing and maintaining uniforms and equipment for approximately 500 athletes on the 23 sports teams based at Assembly Hall. Three student equipment managers assist in Assembly Hall—Natalie Barnhill, Dane Warren and Kurt Kinnaman—and another 105 or so athletes, football players, are tended to at Memorial Stadium’s facilities by Mitch Gudmundson, football equipment manager.

Think the laundry piles up in your home? By the time practices and/or competitions are done for the day, Sears estimates that he and Stillions do 25 loads of laundry every 24 hours for their “kids” in Assembly Hall. Factoring in the 50-pound capacity washers at hand, that translates to about 1,250 pounds of cream-and-crimson jerseys, singlets, shorts, trunks, pants, socks and various unmentionables each and nearly every day.
Just managing the shoes could be a full-time job.

“The shoes are what people want to see when they visit the equipment room. We bring out a size 17 or 18 basketball shoe, and they’re amazed,” said Sears, who took the time to measure a size 18 at nearly 14 inches. He wouldn’t venture a guess as to how many shoes are sitting on equipment and locker room shelves but agreed that it would be a very low, but safe estimate to guess that each athlete has at least two pairs. That equals roughly 1,000 pairs of shoes, from women’s size 4 to that number 18.

“But,” said Sears, “that’s just an average. The bigger guys are really hard on shoes and might blow out several pairs in the course of one season. Men and women soccer players have soft-ground cleats, firm-ground cleats and indoor cleats. And in track and field, a heptathlete might have 10 pairs of shoes for various specialty events.”

After 23 years on the job, Sears has plenty of good stories. It’s true, he said, that equipment managers used to sew Velcro into the waistbands of basketball uniforms worn by Bob Knight-coached teams. You never saw a shirttail out, did you?

It’s also true that Sears has turned a few loads of white T-shirts pink. “Hey,” he said, “when you do as much red and white as we do, you’re occasionally going to see some things pink up. I dare anyone to do 25 loads a day and not have that happen once in a while.”

His best stories have to do with good memories, though. He recalled that he was hired as assistant equipment manager just before Jerry Yeagley’s men’s soccer team won its first NCAA national championship. With a total now of five national titles, Yeagley will retire at the end of this season after 31 years as IU’s only soccer head coach. “When we started this season, I reminded Coach Yeagley I was here for his first title. He said, ‘Yes, I remember that. Let’s go for six.’”

Read about other outstanding IU employees.