Jersey design workshop uses sports to incite creativity at Kennedy Middle School in Redwood City

“This project is one arm of the organization, where we travel the country and work with different organizations and teams to expose students to the basics of design and then have them design their own unique jerseys as a way of expressing themselves,” founder Omri Gal said.

Gal, alongside partner Oliver Steinglass, leverages Design FC’s high-profile partnerships — two of their student-designed jerseys that made it into the FIFA video game, they tell the enthralled sixth graders — to get kids excited to create, drawing on physical jerseys and helping with a virtual end product.

“We work with some of the biggest companies in this industry. And this is actually our favorite part of what we do,” Gal told the group.

Funding for arts and creative programs is typically the first to be cut at public schools, disproportionately impacting low-income communities and school districts, Gal said.

“We typically like to work in areas where students don’t always have a creative outlet. Really, the jerseys become an access point at which we meet our students,” he said.

Boys and Girls Club of the Peninsula serves 150 students at Kennedy Middle School and 5,400 students total. Its after-school programming seeks to engage the middle schoolers, helping them develop interests and passions, while also providing help to parents, Site Director Arnulfo Prado said.

On June 7, the day of the workshop, Kennedy Middle School had a “super minimum” day, meaning school ended at noon — a challenge for some parents that the Boys and Girls Club aims to alleviate, adjusting their programming schedules in response.

“My kid’s out at 12, I’m at work. I can’t just drop everything and go pick them up,” Prado said. “So we aim to support our community.”

Two Design FC workshops, one for the sixth grade and one for the seventh and eighth grade groups, were held as after-school programming with the coordination of Jeeth Das, an incoming senior at Crystal Springs Uplands High School.

Das, a Boys and Girls Club intern, said the workshop is the first of its kind of Boys and Girls Club of the Peninsula and helps foster collaboration between participants and engages them in broader conversations about what matters to them.

“At the end of the day, you have to design one jersey. So you have to be able to collaborate with your teammates and their other group members,” he said.

The jersey-designing process can also be a way to get students familiar with graphics and software programs. Steinglass used Adobe Illustrator to transfix student’s drawings to a virtual jersey mock-up, showing interested kids how to use the software.

“Another really cool aspect of this is exposing kids at a young age to what software looks like that designers use, and showing them that it is accessible,” he said.

Finding new and engaging programming can sometimes be a challenge for the Boys and Girls Club, Prado said, and the Design FC workshop undoubtedly met that standard.

“We want students to feel like there’s something different happening — that doesn’t always come across,” he said. “Sports is something huge that the students love in our program, and so we knew that this is something all three of our grades would be interested in.”

After-school programs run a gamut of interests, Prado said, from presentations on robotics to cooking classes, but the Design FC workshop was something new.

“I told [the eighth graders] … ‘you guys have been here since sixth grade, you know we’ve never done something like this before,’” he said.