Within the sea of red and purple flooding Clemens Stadium on Saturday for the highly-anticipated Tommie-Johnnie football matchup, the number 11 will be floating through the crowd, a symbol of hope that has united Minnesotans over the past several weeks.
When junior Adrian Trow and senior Evan Keil decided to market their own shirt design to distribute to students attending the game — a popular trend among the student body — they had no idea that it would turn into an impactful charitable endeavor.
The two roommates were bouncing ideas off of each other one August afternoon, trying to come up with a catchy design that would contrast the vulgar, inappropriate shirts that have been a notorious aspect of the fierce rivalry. After several failed ideas, they finally came up with the slogan, “I’d rather be lost in St. Paul than found in Collegeville.”
“Adrian saw this design for something like, ‘I’d rather be lost in the woods than found in the city,’ along those lines,” Keil said. “We were like, ‘Hey, that’s perfect for what we’re going for.’”
Keil and Trow would later find out that their shirt had struck at a sensitive topic among Minnesotans: the case of Jacob Wetterling. In 1989, 11-year-old Wetterling was abducted near his hometown in St. Joseph. In early September, almost 27 years later, Wetterling’s remains were found in an open field in Paynesville, about 30 miles from Collegeville. It’s also the city of Saturday’s football game.
Soon after, the two students found themselves in a meeting with Jesse Langer, assistant dean of students. At first, they were perplexed as to how their shirt design could be creating problems.
“We were super confused because our tank wasn’t vulgar like a lot of the other ones were,” Keil said.
“It wasn’t infringing on anything either. We had looked all of that up, like the school crest,” Trow added.
When the two students realized the connection to the Wetterling case, they immediately knew that they had to change their idea — and fast.
“That was the first time anything like that was brought to our attention because in no way was it supposed to be related to that at all,” Trow said. “We had made it months before.”
They went back to redesign the shirts, frantically calling the T-shirt company to change their order, which had already been processed. They had less than a day to come up with a new design. They poured over some past ideas, eventually landing on, “Make the MIAC great again.”
But inspiration struck Trow, giving him an itch to do something in Wetterling’s honor.
The Jacob Wetterling Resource Center released a statement asking people to honor Jacob by wearing the number 11, his jersey number. Since then, the Minnesota Twins, Minnesota Vikings, and a number of other professional and youth sports teams have worn the number 11 in his honor.
“I work for Edina Soccer Association, and the night before we had put number 11 on every kid’s jersey,” Trow said. “So that was kind of like oh, let’s make this a positive thing, and show that St. Thomas can go to a rival school and be there for support.”
Trow and Kiel added a number 11 to the back of their shirt design, but didn’t want to stop there.
“We were thinking about how can we turn this thing into a positive, and the easiest thing for us was to make at least a small contribution through the sales of our tanks to the Jacob Wetterling foundation,” Keil said.
$1 from every $20 shirt sold will be donated to the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center, which was founded to prevent the exploitation of children.
“It’s a small way to show our support, depending on how many tanks we do end up selling,” Keil said.
While St. Thomas and St. John’s will always be divided when it comes to football, Keil and Trow have tried to create common ground amidst such a tragedy.
“Our hearts broke for that community and the people of St. John’s and the surrounding area,” Keil said. “While there is that rivalry, when it comes down to it, we’re all Minnesotans and everybody knew that heartbreak.”
Mary Brickner can be reached at bric0029@stthomas.edu