New York Liberty fans get creative with jerseys, art and cross stitches

NEW YORK — Eric Trude walked into Barclays Center on Sunday afternoon wearing one of the custom jerseys that he had designed to honor two of his great loves — hockey and the New York Liberty. Nobody was as surprised as he was.

Trude, originally from northern Virginia, grew up hating New York sports teams. Basketball was never his thing.

Now, he’s collecting signatures from his favorite Liberty players on the back of his seafoam-green jersey that bears the name of one of the team’s star players, Sabrina Ionescu, on the nameplate. Call him a convert.

As new fans of the WNBA find their way to the game, they are expressing love for their favorite teams creatively — with homemade apparel, crochet, embroidery, painting and even crop art made out of seeds. No group is as thrilled as Liberty fans, who are hoping the team will win its first championship in the franchise’s nearly 30-year history against the Minnesota Lynx this week.

The boom in creative pursuits and art based on the players is dovetailing with the WNBA’s surge in popularity.

Trude, 32, started working with a graphic designer to create his hockey jerseys a few years ago, when the Liberty’s signature green barely registered among New Yorkers. These days he gets stopped on the street. The jerseys, he said, allow him “to immediately make friends with someone.”

Liberty fans are not the only ones who celebrate their team in creative ways. Mary Doyle, 64, created a crop art entry for the Minnesota State Fair this summer with the Lynx logo. She chipped away at it over a few months, using 12 different materials including red and black quinoa, barley, lentils, mung beans, poppy seeds and wild rice.

“I would love to see the Lynx win, but feel for the Liberty because of their long drought,” Doyle said. “I just appreciate these athletes and how good they are and how hard they work.”

After the Liberty’s brutal Game 1 loss to the Lynx, Katelyn Doyle Thornton, 31, said she would still wear her handmade rally towel shirt to Game 2.

“My Liberty superstition is that there is no superstition,” she said. The Liberty went on to win Game 2.

Over the past season, Thornton and her husband have been collecting Liberty towels, which are handed out to fans and have become a hallmark of the team’s tactics for hyping up crowds. A sewing machine Thornton received for Christmas sat dormant until her husband suggested making a shirt out of their growing towel collection.

So Thornton took five towels and got to work, making sure to have Ellie the Elephant, the team’s beloved mascot, on the front.

“I received 13 compliments on it, I counted,” she said. “One girl said, ‘You’re playing chess, where everyone else is playing checkers.’”

Mara Nerenberg, 42, said making cross stitches of her favorite players helped her feel connected to the team. The needlework frames are tiny — about the size of a palm — and take about 10 to 15 hours to complete. But the size also forces her to get creative.

“That’s the fun thing about cross stitch — it’s kind of comical, it’s not obviously an exact representation of the person,” she said. “You have to pick out little characteristics about them that make them stand out.”

For Betnijah Laney-Hamilton, it was her signature pink shoes, and Courtney Vandersloot, her trademark bun.

“What better way to capture my love of this team than do fan art like this?” Nerenberg said. “It’s more than basketball, it’s about community and inclusion.”

For the WNBA, that community often stretches beyond the arena. Such is the case for Samantha Wojciechowicz, a physically disabled artist living in Embrun, Ontario. Canada doesn’t have a WNBA team, so Wojciechowicz roots for the Liberty.

During the pandemic, Wojciechowicz, 30, started making portraits of her favorite athletes using their sports’ corresponding pieces of equipment — for example, painting Caitlin Clark using a basketball and Jason Kelce with a football.

She fell in love with the WNBA last year the same way many new fans find their way to the league — with Ellie the Elephant, the Liberty mascot.

“Seeing her kind of spirit and energy on my feed made me feel good,” Wojciechowicz said. “I really wanted to celebrate her and what she’s brought to sports.”

Wojciechowicz used a basketball to paint a portrait of Ellie, taking about three hours to create the mascot, and documented the whole process on TikTok.

Sharing her paintings online has helped her build her confidence, she said. Wojciechowicz was born with ectrodactyly, a rare genetic disorder that causes fingers and toes to be malformed or absent.

“My art has managed to make me meet so many incredible people and connect with individuals in ways that I never thought would be possible,” she said. “I don’t think I could have connected with them if I didn’t have art.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2024 The New York Times Company