Spartans voice their choice on student section T-shirt designs

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There’s no place for Democrats or Republicans with an important vote facing MSU students — it’s time to decide the 2009 football student section T-shirt.

Voting for the upcoming season’s student section T-shirt can be done at http://www.msuspartans.com/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/062209aaa.html, and the voting period ends July 17. There are three options for the shirt — all with the slogan “We Are Spartans United in Green and White” — and students will pick both the front and back designs.

“It was just kind of an evolution from last year’s ‘We Are One, We Are Spartans,’” MSU athletics director of sales and marketing, Scot Schlesinger, said of this year’s slogan.

Schlesinger said he hopes this year’s student section T-shirt builds on last year’s, which received the silver medal for best student T-shirt design from the National Association of Collegiate Marketing Administrators.

MSU and Nike teamed up to create the concepts, but everything had to go through MSU football head coach Mark Dantonio before the needle was threaded. Brad Ballein, manager of Student Book Store, 421 E. Grand River Ave., said the Dantonio-approved T-shirts from last year sold well. He said while an attractive design helps, other factors such as team success also impact T-shirt sales.

“That’s the way college sporting goods is in general,” he said.

Visitors on campus though, whether they be alumni or parents of students, can’t help but relive their collegiate glory days. So when tailgaters, who once called East Lansing home and claim MSU as their alma mater, make the trek back to Spartan Stadium, they also see students dressed in their student section uniforms.

Rather than living vicariously through students, Ballein said alumni and parents often purchase the student section T-shirt as a way to fit in with the crowd.

“I think giving students a chance to vote will make sure it’s a T-shirt students will want to wear more frequently,” he said. “And people who aren’t students and want to act like they (still are) will want to buy one.”

However, some students don’t see a correlation between voting on a T-shirt design and the likelihood students will wear the shirt.

Trevor Carrington, an accounting senior, said he voted for last year’s shirt but would have worn it even if he didn’t have a choice in the design. He also said there will be students who cast votes for the two designs that are not chosen, but will show up to the stadium in their student section regalia anyway.

“I would wear them no matter what,” he said. “We don’t vote on the Izzone shirts, so it doesn’t really matter.”

Others though, such as criminal justice senior Josh Rentfrow, said the best way to make sure Spartans are “United in Green and White” is to give them the choice for design. That way, it will be a shirt the MSU population, whether football season ticket holders or otherwise, will be proud to wear.

“I think it’s like Dantonio’s point of one team,” he said. “If you can get not just the student section but the parents or the alumni to get involved wearing the same shirt, it kind of brings unity to Michigan State football.”

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