GEAR GURUS
Even though Temple didn’t start its 2025 football season until August 30, when the Owls traveled to Massachusetts, TU head football equipment manager Drew Flack had been ordering team gear for a couple of months.
For 2026.
And if you think that’s easy, you don’t know very much about outfitting a football team. Not only must Flack make sure he gets the right stuff for the players and coaches, he must do it without knowing who more than half the players on the roster will be next year. Thanks to the NCAA rules that allow players to transfer from school to school without any penalty, Temple will lose dozens of players after this season and gain just as many before next. So, when Flack was trying to figure out how many large T-shirts or size 13 cleats to get, he was basically guessing.
“The big thing that a lot of people don’t realize about equipment, especially with the transfer portal, is that we have 116 players and 50 staff members,” Flack says. “Nobody even thinks about the 30 transfers who will arrive in January and the 20 freshmen who come in June. We have to get them all up to speed.
“It puts a lot of stress on you. We’re ordering right now for kids who are coming next June. It takes a toll. We’re trying to figure out who’s going to be here.”
Flack’s problem isn’t unique to Temple. Neither are the myriad of other challenges that arise daily for those tasked with providing equipment to football programs in the area. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a team like Temple, which plays at the NCAA’s highest level, or a Division III squad like Widener, Flack and those like him must anticipate issues, satisfy demands and often provide quick-fix solutions while game action is taking place.
Equipment manager can be a maddening job, but it’s also a vital position in the football world, one which gives those who perform it an inside role in the college athletics world.
“It definitely has its stresses, but then I check myself and I say, ‘I’m sitting out here at practice on a field with the football team,’” says Villanova’s Mike Brazill. “It’s pretty cool.”
As one might expect, there are different levels of equipment volume available at different colleges, based on their budgets and sizes. For instance, Flack reports that at the beginning of summer practice, each player receives 21 different items, including four T-shirts, four pairs of shorts, two hoodies, a pair of sweatpants, 12 pairs of socks, five pairs of shoes, a backpack, cleats, a baseball cap, a bucket hat and compression shorts. That doesn’t include practice and game equipment, like shoulder pads, helmets, etc.
At West Chester University, according to head equipment manager [for all sports] Jimmy Maguire, the Rams players get two sets of workout gear [shirts and shorts], a pair of practice pants that are reused every year and a travel sweat suit. Players also have “two or three” sets of practice gear and cleats. There isn’t a lot of leftover inventory, so if a player loses or damages something, he may not get a replacement.
“If they come back to us and have ripped something or have misplaced it, we don’t have the resources to give them something new,” Maguire says. “That’s the way it is. Other places have endless supplies of things. We have to be frugal with what we give out.”
There is also a difference in the size of the staff schools have. Flack has two full-time assistants and ten interns. At ‘Nova, Brazill relies on a handful of student workers and must also handle equipment responsibilities for the men’s and women’s tennis teams. Maguire has one full-time assistant, but is in charge of equipment for all WCU teams. A full-time operations assistant helps with laundry responsibilities but has several other duties.
Once the season starts, most equipment managers get into a good routine that allows them to keep the operations moving smoothly. During the week, the biggest chore is laundering the practice gear and making sure the players are ready to get on the field every day. Flack says he and his staff can clean clothes in Temple’s three washers and three dryers for “six straight hours” on practice days. “We easily go through 300 or 400 towels,” he says.
Equipment managers’ responsibilities on game days vary, depending on whether their team is playing at home or on the road. When the Owls headed to UMass for their 2025 season opener, Flack and his traveling staff got to the stadium at noon on Friday, along with the team’s 53-foot semi-trailer that is “stocked to the absolute max,” to set up the locker room for the next day. “We try to make it as much like our home stadium [Lincoln Financial Field] as possible,” he says. That means every locker will have a full uniform in it, and most of the other equipment, such as towels, is laid out. The entire process takes about “five-to-six hours,” according to Flack.
The next day, Flack and his staff arrive at the stadium six hours before kickoff. They make sure the headsets used on the sidelines and in the coaches’ booth are set up and working and handle any last-minute issues that may arise. During the game, the equipment crew repairs any helmets or shoulder pads that break and replaces any cleats, if necessary. Cleanup begins after halftime, when staff members bring out players’ bags and trunks that hold team gear. Once the game ends, it’s all about gathering uniforms, headsets and other gear, packing the truck and hitting the road, ideally, 75 minutes following the final gun. When the Owls play at home, Flack operates as if it’s a road game. “We can’t keep anything at the Linc,” he says. “If we forget something on campus on game day, we forget it.”
When ‘Nova heads on the road, Brazill and his staff head out in a box truck the day before and might not stay in the same hotel as the team.
For instance, when the Wildcats played at Army in 2022, the team stayed in New York City, which is about 90 minutes outside of West Point, while the equipment managers chose a place much closer to campus. Like Flack’s crew, Brazill and his team spend Friday setting up the locker room. Game day is about emergency repairs, packing up afterward and getting back to campus. While noon kickoffs mean getting to the stadium early in the morning, they also mean earlier returns to campus to handle laundry, a task which Flack says can take up to seven hours. If the team doesn’t return until late at night, that means Sunday will be “an all-day laundry fest,” according to Flack.
Because Maguire has so much to do at West Chester, he doesn’t travel with the team. He loads three travel bins onto the team buses. Included are extra shoulder pads and helmets. A lot of responsibility falls on the players.
“I don’t pack their bags for them,” Maguire says. “We give them bags, and I trust them to pack everything they need. We help them throughout the week to make sure they have what they need.”
Maguire sets up lockers for home games the day before, and since the games usually take place early in the afternoon, he arrives at about 5 am on Saturdays. But Maguire can’t devote himself completely to the team once the game starts because of his operations duties.
“One of the coaches can help with the equipment,” he says. “I give them a bag with tools and parts for the shoulder pads and helmets.”
Although each level of the football equipment world has different specific responsibilities, the overall job remains the same for all: make sure teams have what they need to win. The job entails plenty of long hours, hard work and laundry detergent.
“It takes patience and organization,” Brazill says. “The kids don’t always realize what we do.”
And how far in advance they sometimes do it.
