ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — Football and the space program will share the same stage on Friday night in Orlando.
What You Need To Know
- UCF’s Space Game is Friday against Memphis at the Bounce House
- This year's jerseys honor the 40th anniversary of the Space Shuttle program's start
- They also recognize UCF alums who had a hand in the shuttle program
This year’s Space Game, a tradition that started in 2017, is a matchup between Memphis and the University of Central Florida the UCF Bounce House.
With 2021 marking 40 years since the start of the Space Shuttle program in 1981, that legacy will be front and center for this year’s contest.
The uniform design, spearheaded in UCF’s athletics department by Emma Schneider and Sahid Alpizar for a second year, includes all kinds of nods to the Space Shuttle program. The collar is designed to mimic the nose of the Space Shuttle, and the jersey numbers include squares similar to the Space Shuttle thermal protection system tiles. Each of the jersey’s tiles pay tribute to a different one of the 135 shuttle missions.
Schneider said it took quite a bit of work to pull this off and they relied on support from several other members of the equipment department to execute their vision.
“They worked a hand-in-hand with us in terms of figuring out what's the best way to design the helmet, getting all of the elements, and then finally putting them together with the chrome facemask,” Schneider said.
Schneider and Alpizar faced the added challenge of bringing the jersey design together during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We were all forced to work from home at that time,” Alpizar said. “So, we made it work and did the best we could to come up with the theme, even though we were not physically all together as a team.”
The first year of the Space Game jersey was marked with just a shoulder patch on the UCF football uniforms, but it was such a popular theme that the full jersey was included in the design the following year. Now it includes the entire uniform.
UCF has had a long history with the space program. The university was founded in 1963 as Florida Technological University “with the mission of providing personnel to support the growing U.S. space program at the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.”
The stripe down the middle of this year’s helmet names more than 100 UCF alumni, faculty and fans who had a hand in the Space Shuttle program. The university noted that 29 percent of KSC employees are UCF alumni.
One alumna got a special nod in the jersey design: Nicole Stott, a retired astronaut, co-founder of the Space for Art Foundation and author of the new book, “Back to Earth: What Life in Space Taught Me About our Home Planet and our Mission to Protect It.”
She flew to the International Space Station as part of STS-128 and STS-133 on Space Shuttle Discovery. She said the whole initiative is wonderful and she thinks that the inclusion of Discovery was special.
“Even though the Space Shuttle Discovery wasn't, you know, an alum of UCF, so many people that have gone there worked on that spacecraft,” Stott said. “And to see that being brought forward, the story of the Space Shuttle and the Space Shuttle program being brought forward through these uniforms and the intention of it. I just love it.”
She said that having these unique opportunities to bring space to the public are important to help inspire people.
“These kinds of things, I think, are really interesting because they might get someone, just like using art to engage an audience that might not know about the Space Station,” Stott said. “These kinds of things for the UCF population, for the greater community, might make someone aware of something really important that they didn’t know about or even know they had some connection to as well. I like that that’s part of what will happen with this, too.”