Florida boy’s homemade design inspired a real T-shirt. It crashed the university’s site
A young boy in Florida was bullied for wearing a handmade T-shirt of his favorite university. When the school found out, they turned his design into an official T-shirt. It was so popular, their website crashed.
The fourth-grader wanted to represent the University of Tennessee during College Color Day at Altamonte Elementary School last month, but didn’t have any official apparel to wear, said Laura Snyder, his teacher.
So, he made his own.
He drew the school’s logo — “U.T.” — on paper and pinned it to an orange T-shirt with the help of his mother.
Snyder said the boy was excited about his shirt but when he went back to the classroom after lunch, he started crying at his desk.
“Some girls at the lunch table next to his (who didn’t even participate in college colors day) had made fun of his sign that he had attached to his shirt,” Snyder wrote on Facebook last week. “He was DEVASTATED.”
He returned home without the design on his shirt.
Snyder’s Facebook post went viral. Then, the university in Knoxville decided to turn his design into an official school T-shirt, with the proceeds (after printing costs) going to nonprofit STOMP Out Bullying.
“When I told him that his design was being made into a real shirt and people wanted to wear it, his jaw dropped,” Snyder wrote Friday. “He had a big smile on his face, walked taller, and I could tell his confidence grew today!”
News of the new T-shirt went so viral that on Saturday the school’s official online campus store crashed from the influx of orders for most of the weekend.
The shirt, which went on sale Friday, had more than 16,000 orders by 3 p.m. Monday, according to Donde Plowman, the university’s chancellor.
The website is back up, as of Tuesday morning.
“I was touched to learn of a young Florida elementary school student’s heart for the University of Tennessee, and I loved his imagination behind designing his own shirt,” said Randy Boyd, the university’s interim president, in a statement. “So many of us admire his love for the University of Tennessee, and we were happy to reward his creativity with a ‘fan pack’ from Knoxville.”
The “fan pack” included shirts, bracelets and pens — enough to share with his class — and a personalized video message from the school’s spirit team.
“This experience is uniting my class even more than I could have imagined, and it was truly amazing to witness!! ... THANK YOU so much so all who have made this such a positive experience for my student, and also showing the rest of my class what it’s like to come together and be kind,” Snyder wrote.
This story was originally published September 10, 2019 at 12:18 PM with the headline "Florida boy’s homemade design inspired a real T-shirt. It crashed the university’s site."
