Almost two weeks after the Kansas basketball team’s loss to Virginia Commonwealth University in the NCAA tournament, Jayhawk Spirit owner Tom Wilkerson, whose store sells KU apparel, is still agonizing over the game.
But while the rest of Jayhawk nation can turn off ESPN and try to forget the loss, Wilkerson has to deal with the daily reminder of lost revenue and the question of what to do with the boxes of KU Final Four T-shirts he pre-ordered.
“Right now they are sitting in a warehouse,” he said. “As long as we don’t distribute them, they can sit there forever I guess, but obviously space is important for us so we’d just as soon get them on their way.”
When the men’s basketball team made the Elite Eight this year, Lawrence businesses such as Jayhawk Spirit and Jock’s Nitch ordered hundreds of pre-made KU Final Four shirts to sell to the crowds that would have appeared on Massachusetts Street had Kansas won the next game.
However, what happened — well, happened — and now stores are left with boxes and boxes of T-shirts commemorating a Final Four berth that never happened.
“I don’t really want to give you the exact number, but it’s in the hundreds,” Wilkerson said referring to the number of T-shirts he ordered. Now Wilkerson is looking for an organization to take the shirts and distribute them to people in need.
At first, entities like Goodwill or Salvation Army come to mind, but the donation of the shirts has a catch. According to the contract Wilkerson signed with Adidas, the company that made the shirts, the shirts must either be donated to somewhere outside of the U.S. or destroyed.
“My guess is the NCAA and Adidas enter into an agreement that none of them will be on the market unless they win,” he said referring to the T-shirts.
Wilkerson said he had destroyed pre-ordered shirts in 2003 when Kansas lost the national championship, but this year he hoped he would be able to find a place to take the shirts.
“It’s the idea that they might actually do some good,” Wilkerson said. “If we had a contact or something that was going to take them to Japan that would be a perfect place for them to go.”
Wilkerson has another reason to donate the shirts. The last time he destroyed shirts, he had to destroy each shirt by hand with scissors.
When asked how long the destruction took he laughed and answered, “Too long; that’s why I would rather donate them.”
Jock’s Nitch is also looking for a place to donate their Final Four T-shirts. Jock’s Nitch general manager Ryan Owens said the company hopes to hear back in the next few days from World Vision, an organization that accepts product donations and distributes the donations as humanitarian aid. He said the shirts would then be shipped overseas, likely to Africa.
According to World Vision, product donations can be counted as tax deductions for qualifying companies.