Just for kicks, go talk to Brian Brigger.
Well, for shirts and shorts and jerseys and wristbands, too.
Around McKale Center, the Arizona basketball staff has a certain nickname for Brigger, Arizona’s assistant director of equipment operations.
#EMOY – Equipment Manager of the Year.
They’ve flooded Twitter with hype. When Greg Byrne announced he was leaving Arizona, someone even floated EMOY for athletic director.
Check this: He’s got his own Zona Zoo fathead.
“That itself shows you’ve made it in Arizona basketball,” UA trainer Justin Kokoskie said. “When you’ve got your own fathead? What other equipment manager in the country has that? I told him, ‘You’ve made it. You’ve made it, Brigger.’”
The players? They have another nickname for him.
“Santa Claus,” Dusan Ristic says outside of the USC locker room earlier this month.
Ol’ Saint Nick
The 34-year-old Brigger just might be the most well-liked guy in McKale Center.
There’s the guy who monitors your Psych 232 attendance, and there’s the guy who makes it rain shoes, socks, jerseys galore. Who are you going to like more? Easy choice.
Asked about Brigger after Arizona’s huge 96-85 win over then-No. 3 UCLA two weeks ago, Kobi Simmons lights up.
“Brigger is a great guy,” Simmons said. “It’s not just giving us things, being Santa Claus, as Dusan says. His interaction with the players, having a relationship outside of what he does — I think that’s really huge for our team.”
He’s Johnny on the spot, the first man off the bench to provide a towel or water bottle or a chest bump. There’s a classic Twitter clip of Brigger doing a fist bump and salute, screaming after a play. They call it the #EMOY Salute.
And you haven’t seen clutch until you’ve seen Brigger re-lace a pair of shoes.
This is a guy who likes to be in control. He’s attentive, bordering on obsessive; he calls himself “paranoid” when it comes to travel.
If Arizona plays on a Thursday and leaves on a Wednesday, then Brigger packs on Tuesday. If he packed on Monday, he says, “I’d go crazy rechecking it.”
On road trips, his roommates are nine equipment bags.
Five years back, the Wildcats staff forgot a dry-erase board on a trip to Oregon. That was Brigger’s doomsday scenario.
Two years ago, when Arizona traveled to USC’s Galen Center, Aaron Gordon’s shoelace broke on the court. Brigger couldn’t get to a backup pair in time, but went to work nonetheless. During a media timeout, he de-shoed Gordon and re-laced it quicker than coach Sean Miller could spell out the next defensive trap.
This is why Miller and Ryan Reynolds, the team’s director of operations, brought Brigger here from Pittsburgh, where he worked for Jamie Dixon and Co. for seven-plus years.
The three go way back: Brigger was a senior manager for the Xavier basketball team when Reynolds was a freshman manager and Miller was an assistant coach. Reynolds played high school football for Brigger’s uncle. The ties that bind.
Speaking of binding: In those days, Xavier wasn’t given all the benefits of a Pac-12 power. The Musketeers were given blank jerseys — Reynolds said they had to put the names, logos and numbers on the jerseys themselves.
Brigger was long on Miller and Reynolds’ radar, and when a position opened up in late December 2011, he jumped at the chance. He was assigned to men’s basketball in 2012; he also works with the Wildcats’ women’s soccer, men’s tennis and men’s golf teams.
It wasn’t the prospect of working with Miller alone that brought Brigger to Tucson, and it wasn’t about the UA campus. It wasn’t about the baseball team’s soon-to-be national championship, or the dozens of softball trophies. It wasn’t about Arizona’s myriad Olympians.
It was all of it. And a little more.
“I always wanted to go to a Final Four,” Brigger said. “Hopefully win a national championship, be a part of that.”
In Miller, he sees a coach who can get him there. And also someone who gives him a lot of latitude and input, something he appreciates.
For the most part, Miller stays above the frayed edges.
Every so often, he’ll spot a particular uniform cut on another team and beckon Brigger. A couple years ago, at a road trip in Seattle against the Washington Huskies, Miller spotted a Nike dri-fit shirt he liked. He passed along the info to Brigger, and within weeks, Arizona had its own.
Arizona basketball gear is revealed to the Wildcats’ staff every July. They’ll get the line art directly from Nike, which designs the clothes and shoes with Arizona’s input. If Nike only offers a pair of navy warmup shorts, the Wildcats might ask for red ones. A navy long-sleeve polo in lieu of gray.
“Most of the time when we respond with something,” Brigger said, “Nike comes back good to go.”
This rainbow of color, this wave of variety, started a little over a decade ago. The position of equipment manager has evolved just like the jerseys they provide.
Changing tides
Brigger remembers the first time Pitt’s players pleaded with Jamie Dixon for a gold uniform.
This was not the Oregon Ducks, all flash and dance. This is the blue-collar ’Burgh. Rust Belt, baby. Dixon was resistant, and, Brigger said, “It was slow. They hadn’t had a gold uni in a while.”
Brigger spoke with Nike and made it happen.
“When I was in college, you’d have a team with a gray uniform, maybe once, but by the late-2000s the uniform thing had officially happened,” he said.
On Thursday night at McKale Center, Arizona sported a beautiful white home uniform with shimmering gold print. And the Wildcats don’t even have gold as a color. That’s how much the uni game has changed.
Asked his thoughts about the gear after the game, Miller was pleased. Arizona will use more than a half-dozen different jersey combinations, including Thursday’s white-and-gold ensemble.
“Nike, they take great care of us,” Miller said. “We have quite an arsenal of uniforms, for sure. It probably felt funny looking at us play in gold.”
Brigger knows in a hurry if they have a hit or a dud.
“They’ll tell you on social media if they like it or don’t,” he said with a laugh. “You see the passion, especially here.”
Arizona is one of Nike’s top six to eight schools, along with Duke, Florida and UConn, among others, the Platinum Elite level.
In 2015, the program re-upped with Nike for another decade in a huge, multimillion-dollar deal, one that increased the Wildcats’ gear and equipment allowance to $2.15 million a year.
It’s not just the shoes, though they’re pretty sweet.
Players get two pairs of Kobes — three including the camos — and two pairs of Durants. Five fresh pairs, every year. For special occasions, the Wildcats might even add some flair; two years ago for the Pac-12 Tournament, Arizona wore a pair of custom Kobes, red with a green saguaro cactus on the swoosh. Other teams had basic colors, but Nike did a little something extra for Arizona.
The shoes alone are worth a mint. The rest of the gear isn’t bad, either.
The rundown:
“Starting in the fall, three-quarter tights, regular tights, padded tights, short-sleeve shirts, sleeveless shirt, jersey, shorts, four pairs of socks,” Brigger said. “Add a third loop when you travel, and by the end of one year, you have enough stuff for practice.”
The sheer magnitude of it astounds him.
“It’s crazy from where it was when I was a manager to now,” he said. “Even at some of the smaller schools, they still get a lot. We give out a lot.”
Don’t picture the equipment room as a walk-in Nordstrom Rack. There are limits and, as Brigger says, “You can’t just give out shirts to everyone. Compliance monitors it.”
Eventually, though, it adds up.
“Guys who’ve been here, Parker, Dusan, they’ve got so much stuff,” he said. “Now, some of the older stuff is their workout stuff, new stuff is walk-around stuff. Basketball shoes — in four years, a player could end up with 20, 25 pairs of shoes.
“But really, these guys don’t ask me for stuff. If there’s a need, I’ll ask them. It’s not, ‘I want, I want, I want.’ If I see something, a white undershirt that’s dingy – well if I have one, I’ll just say, ‘here.’”
Now you know why they call him Santa Claus.
Also, because he’s damn jolly, and in the high-pressure cooker that is Arizona basketball — where, Reynolds says, “It’s not like you go .500 and it’s, ‘OK, let’s go next year.’ You go .500, it’s a problem. So someone trying to keep it loose and free and having fun, that’s huge.”
Just watch the players chest-bump Brigger during games. Pure joy.
“He has no ego,” Kokoskie said. “He’s like a kid in a candy store — he’s still in awe of this. There’s not one day that goes by when he passes something on to someone else. He could be completely happy at a small school, working D-III basketball in Cincinnati, and he’d do the job the exact same way.”
He acts like this because he knows in a very realistic alternative world, that’s exactly what he’d be doing.
That attitude is infectious. He’s a hit among the Arizona staff. They kid about the #EMOY thing, but they also mean it.
“He’s a celebrity unto himself,” Kokoskie said. “He goes out into town and people recognize him. We’re at a restaurant a month ago, and someone comes up to him and says you’re the EMOY! We’re trying to turn him into a top-notch celebrity in town.”
doing the dirty work
Then there are the times when Brigger puts on a brave face and a clothespin on his nose and enters the fray, like a rebounder caroming in from the 3-point line. He dives right in.
The tired, worn-out trope of the geeky equipment guy getting a jock strap thrown on his head, that’s a relic of the past. This is an expensive endeavor they’ve got going on here.
But, yeah, Brigger does his fair share of laundry. OK, a lot of laundry. Wash, rinse, repeat. You know the drill.
He handles detergent like Parker Jackson-Cartwright handles the ball. You think Simmons can jam? Watch Brigger dunk a laundry pod. He’s the Larry Bird of bleach. The “Clyde the Glide” of Tide.
Need a spokesman for a new fluff-and-fold? None better.
“I’m used to it,” Brigger says of the mountains upon mountains of sweaty, dingy, get-these-away-from-me gear. “Luckily, we don’t have wrestling here.”
At Pitt, they had wrestling.
Brigger laughs, shakes his head and laughs again.
His nose curls. Smell is one of the most recallable senses. You can almost see his eyes water.
“Woooo, the wrestlers,” he said.
Sweat, the Small Stuff
Have to ask.
“And what about Miller?”
“He handles his own shirts.”
OK, so Brigger’s off the hook.
Miller took a beating on social media for sweating through a white dress shirt just minutes into last March’s NCAA Tournament loss to Wichita State.
The coach handled the situation with humor, even going so far as saying he’d received several boxes of shirts, including one from the CEO of Tommy John, after the pore performance.
Brigger wishes he would’ve stepped up sooner.
“If it was my shirt?” Brigger said. “Nope, nope, don’t blame coach, that’s on me.”
Brigger’s relationship with Miller is great, something he values. Miller is not a man who likes chaos, disorder. His staff is filled with people he trusts, people from his past, coaches and support staff who go back decades.
Brigger does not take that for granted.
“He’s intense when he needs to be intense, and he doesn’t ask me for a lot, but if he needs something, I get it for him,” Brigger said. “You try to take care of them as much as you can. We have a good budget, and if there’s something he likes, he’ll come and tell me.”
Miller puts it plainly: “You want to come into this arena, coaching at the highest level, competing for the top prize, with people who have your back.”
And in Brigger, he has that.
“Managers, in my opinion, they have a résumé like no one else,” Miller said. “No. 1, they’re juggling an academic workload, they have to be incredibly selfless, work for a team, have to give their time without a lot of fanfare. (Former assistant) James Whitford was a manager, (current assistant) Joe Pasternack was a manager, Ryan Reynolds was a manager. Those guys know how to work for something bigger than themselves.
“And Brigger,” Miller continues, “he’s the best. He is as selfless a person I’ve ever been around. Players on the team absolutely love him, and he loves what he does. He adds incredible value not just to our program but the entire department.”
