WHO: The Texas Tech club hockey team
WHAT: The squad’s new flour tortilla–themed jerseys
WHY IT’S SO GREAT: The tortillas were flying early and often Saturday in Lubbock after Texas Tech took a 14–0 lead against Arizona State in its—wait for it—Big 12 football season opener. But the top tortilla story in Red Raiders sports last week was, believe it or not, hockey. On Thursday, the school’s club team unveiled an alternate jersey that splits the difference between quirky novelty and Red Raiders tradition. Behold, the tortilla jersey!
As Lubbock sports radio host Rob Breux wrote, it’s “a sports uniform that honor[s] the greatest thing a human can make with flour.”
The jersey was the brainchild of Texas Tech Hockey Club president Peter Loncar, a junior defenseman and mechanical engineering major from the Dallas area. The team rebranded its primary and secondary jerseys a few years ago, so it was time to have a little fun with the custom of Tech fans tossing tortillas onto the football field during the opening kickoff, even if the practice’s origin remains unclear.
“The idea kind of hit me out of nowhere,” Loncar says. “What if we had tortilla jerseys? Like, not just a patch [of a tortilla]. Make the entire jersey a tortilla?”
The team’s apparel company, X Jerseys, in San Antonio, couldn’t have been happier to taco its best shot. “I have done some pretty cool alternative jerseys over the years, but this is definitely in the top five,” cofounder Ryan Oson, also a hockey player, says. “Because of how custom it was and what it connected to.”
The company’s designer, Tanner Richardson (who plays college club hockey at the University of Missouri), didn’t have to look far for inspiration. “I did in fact walk to my kitchen and go through my cabinets to find a tortilla, and had it on my desk for the entirety of the design process,” he says. He considered about twenty different concepts, but in the end, it always came back to big and simple. “I didn’t want to beat around the bush and have people guessing what this was,” Richardson says. “I wanted to be matter-of-fact and to the point, so that when people saw this jersey, they were thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, is that a tortilla?’ ”
It sure was: Richardson created an all-purpose flour–colored jersey that had somehow found its way to a comal, with telltale brown freckling. From there, Loncar had the idea to put numbers on the chests of the jerseys, in another nod to football, as well as a Lone Star flag on each shoulder.
The tortilla jerseys gave the Texas Tech program unprecedented exposure, including an article on the NHL website and an Instagram post from the college hockey podcast The Hockey House that Loncar says racked up more than 200,000 views. His two older brothers, who also played club hockey at Tech, told him that was only about 199,900 more engagements than the social media stats their teams had put up. X Jerseys has also been getting orders for about twenty jerseys a day during the current two-week sale period, whereas in the past, it might have sold twenty total (plus another twenty hoodies).
Those sales help pay for team expenses. There’s no ice rink in Lubbock, nor a sheet at Texas Tech’s United Supermarkets Arena. Lubbock used to have a minor league hockey team, the Cotton Kings (co-owned by former Tech basketball coach Mark Adams), which played at City Bank Coliseum, but that team folded in 2007, and the building was demolished in 2018. Because of that, the team can only practice once a week, 120 miles away in Amarillo, with the 22 players giving up big parts of their Sundays (though that’s an improvement over last year, when practices were held on Friday nights).
Tech’s club squad also plays an independent schedule rather than in the Texas Collegiate Hockey Conference (which includes the likes of Texas, Texas A&M, and Baylor), with long road trips to play East Texas Baptist (in Shreveport, Louisiana), the University of Houston, and UTSA. At home—which is to say, in Amarillo—they’ll face those same three teams, with the tortilla jerseys making their debut in the home opener against the Roadrunners on October 11.
Some Tech fans have suggested that it’s also time to bring the tortilla-tossing tradition to hockey, for a West Texas version of the Detroit Red Wings’ octopus throw.
“But I don’t know if the rink manager would appreciate that,” Loncar says. Indeed, wet tortillas would be harder to scrape off the ice than slippery cephalopods. But maybe there’s another promotional opportunity at some point down the line: How about mixing a big bowl of dough, portioning it into balls (or pucks!), and rolling out the world’s largest tortilla by Zamboni?
