In the D.C. region, conversations often start with, “What do you do?” WTOP’s series “Working Capital” profiles the people doing the work that makes the region unique.
The Ravens’ secret weapon? The official team seamstress
Ebony Short didn’t grow up thinking she would work in sports. The Baltimore City native went to design school in New York and did costume work for a company behind some of the unique outfits seen in Broadway shows, including The Lion King and Cinderella.
She was in the midst of moving to California when she stopped at home to visit family and stumbled upon the opportunity. She applied to the Baltimore Ravens’ director of uniform services opening out of curiosity more than anything else.
“What was great was that it just looked like I could see potential for growth, that it could be even bigger than what I think that they maybe even realized,” Short said. “At first it was like, ‘We just need someone that can kind of like hem and put things together.’ But now it’s grown into this thing where we are customizing the majority of our gear for the guys.”
The gear being jerseys, pants and every other aspect of uniform equipment a player might wear.
“We do a lot of special alterations,” Short said. “We’ll make padding. We make about 3,500 pads a year.”
The pads go inside jerseys, pants — she’s even had to sew them into socks. Anyone that’s bought a football jersey to support their favorite team knows the sizes are fairly uniform, and anyone who has watched football knows players come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes players are between jersey sizes. One size might be too tight and restrictive, the next size might be too loose.
“The primary goal is to help create performance wear so that these guys can go out and perform to their best ability,” Short said. “So we accommodate that in whatever way that looks like.”
Ebony Short alters a Baltimore Ravens uniform
Ebony Short alters a uniform for a Baltimore Ravens player as part of her job customizing the team’s gear. (WTOP/John Domen)
Sometimes that means altering specific parts of the jersey.
“Some things we’ll do is open up arm holes, because our linemen don’t have as much mobility from their uniform that’s restricting them,” she said. “And if there’s one thing you don’t want as a player it’s to be restricted by your uniform. Or if it’s a little loose and they’re being held and the referees aren’t calling it — you want to be able to cover all of the, like, possibilities of what their performance would look like.”
It’s a job she admitted she never even knew existed, and one that’s evolved a lot in the years since. It’s also not as far away from the theater scene she got her start in as you would think.
“I can’t stick rhinestones on the guys, which would be fun,” she said with a smile. “But I think most of the creation comes into, like, the problem-solving.
“In a lot of ways, it’s very similar to theater,” she added. “Some of the magic of theater is that you don’t know how the trick happened. And so I think here is the same thing. … We have these things that we have to solve, but we also don’t want people to know how the trick happened.”
Short has a good reason for not knowing the job even existed; as far as most NFL teams are concerned, it doesn’t. Most teams just have an equipment guy figure it out.
“We’ve had some teams that are like, ‘We’ll send you jerseys, can you just help us figure this out?'” she said. “Or the best part is, when we’ve got guys who played with us before, and they go to other teams and they’re like, ‘I want my stuff like the Ravens.'”
The job can easily run 60 hours a week during the season, and she doesn’t do it all alone. And in a sport known for being a copy cat league, she think it’s only a matter of time before more teams employ someone like her. But for now, she’s quite happy having a unique role.
“I feel like it gives us an advantage,” she said. “They get similar uniforms, and the positions are similar, so the body types are also similar.”
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