Worst-dressed list
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Who has the worst uniforms in the Southland, besides sportswriters?
Until attending the Servite-Edison game on Friday, it looked like Long Beach Poly would wear that distinction. The Jackrabbits’ gold road jersey with the white numbers is impossible to read. Plus, the Poly numbers are kind of smallish, especially on the front.
Then I got a load of Servite’s fashion taste on Friday: White, with white numbers.
Check out this video from last night’s game and see for yourself:
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so bad,” said Barry Sher, a defensive coordinator at Los Alamitos who had no chance of reading the numbers from one of the upper rows at Orange Coast College. It must be a killer trying to pick up a number on video when scouting. And while that might offer teams a strategic advantage, it also works against fans, who can’t tell the players without binoculars.
Troy Thomas, Servite’s coach, claimed ignorance when it came to graphic correctness. “Our black jerseys are all black with a white outline, and we just went with the same style, with the white,” he said.
They’re terrible, I said.
“Terrible? Sorry.”
It was a somewhat sheepish answer, like maybe he really didn’t know the difference. Or maybe I’m gullible.
But Thomas then went on to explain: “We really like our all blacks, so we were trying to get more black in our homes,” he said, explaining the black with black numbers. “If you watch our home jerseys, they’re exactly the same except they just don’t have the stripes on them. That was the reason, to kind of keep it uniform.”
Until the past two weeks, I thought the worst uniforms I had ever seen belonged to Colton in the days before Allen Bradford: red jerseys with red numbers, essentially rendering the numbers invisible. That situation was made worse because of the double-wing offense the team ran. Or maybe it was single wing, I can never keep my wings straight. But it was impossible to find who had the ball out of that offense, and then after finding the ball carrier, impossible to tell what his number was.
Teams should do everyone (including their fans) a favor: Dark against light, and light against dark. And for Poly and Servite, I suggest buying some magic markers and getting to work.
- Martin Henderson