Meet Pete Rogers, the Celtics fan who designs a new jersey after every win
From the MBTA to Boston Marathon blue and gold, Pete Rogers is redesigning Celtics jerseys with a local flair.
Pete Rogers can remember openly weeping twice in his life.
There were tears of joy on his wedding day, and also when Malcolm Butler sealed the Patriots’ victory on the final play of Super Bowl XLIX.
Rogers, 31, grew up in Lincoln, and is a diehard Boston sports fan. He’s since relocated to Minneapolis, where he runs a fantasy football website.
It can be tough keeping up with local sports teams when you live roughly 1,400 miles away. It was also tough finding things to do when the country was under lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic.
So, Rogers gave himself a challenge: Design one Celtics-themed jersey for every win this season.
“I have always loved sports, particularly Boston sports,” Rogers said. “I had seen people mocking up jerseys and I thought it would be fun. It wasn’t until the start of the pandemic that I found a template. I was just searching the internet because the whole world had shut down.”
As he scrolled through his Twitter timeline, Rogers kept seeing posts from Rita Carvalho, a 49ers fan who grew her following by drawing a different picture of San Fransisco quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo every day,
Rogers was inspired by the challenge of tackling the same subject from a slightly different angle every day.
“The Celtics are one of those teams, like the Lakers, that really are a staple of the NBA,” Rogers said. “There really hasn’t been much change to the jerseys over the years. People are pretty steadfast. They’re like this is how the jerseys are, and you can’t touch them, they’re classics. That’s fair, the Celtics jerseys are beautiful. But, they’re a team that I feel like people have trouble doing mockups and concepts for.”
So far, the designs people have engaged with the most have been based on local themes.
He made a newsprint-themed jersey with clips of old Boston Globe stories running down the side. There’s a blue-and-gold Boston Marathon-inspired design.
He’s even got an MBTA-themed design with red, orange, green, and blue lines running through the transportation authority’s logo. One of his Twitter followers added a fire emoji to the red line “for authenticity.”
Rogers, who has had an interest in graphic design from a young age, makes the jersey edits by using Adobe Photoshop. He taught himself how to use the application by making movie posters when he was younger.
He estimates that his designs take him about two hours per jersey. He often makes them in batches, partially because of how often the Celtics play and also because his time is limited as a stay-at-home dad with twins who are almost one-year-olds.
Rogers said he isn’t quite sure what the end goal for his jersey design project is. It began as a pandemic hobby and happened to gain a following. That alone makes him happy.
The logical next step, he said, would be to find a manufacturer and start selling them since his followers have been asking him to do so.
“Everyone’s been asking,” Rogers said. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to get these things actually manufactured. Because I would love to be able to actually produce them. I’d love to make some money, but more so because I’d like to actually have them and wear them.”
After almost 20 designs, social media responses to Rogers work have been overwhelmingly positive with little exception.
However, last month a Reddit user accused Rogers of copying a design that had been posted several months earlier. When asked about it, Rogers said that he makes every design that he posts himself and hadn’t seen the other design before he made his own.
“I think there’s no fun in that,” Rogers said. “As a designer I wouldn’t take someone else’s design and tweak it because that negates the creative process that I enjoy.”
Rogers dreams of being able to design a jersey for a professional franchise one day. He hopes that enough people have tagged the Celtics on his social media posts for his hometown franchise to notice him.
But for now, he’s in it for the love of the game. It’s his way of staying connected to the team he grew up watching while living in another time zone.
“I wanted something that could sustain me for the whole season,” Rogers said. “I wanted it to be a season-long ongoing project that would tie me to the Celtics. Having it tied to wins forces me to keep tabs on the Celtics and watch as many games as I can.”