We’ve made it to the Sweet Sixteen and more. One could say this may be some payback for the 2001 loss to Duke in the championship game, but it may just be better to say that Arizona played one of the best second halfs EVER and transformed Duke from a never-ending powerhouse into a handful of guys that looked lost on the court. *whew!*

If anyone remembers the old NBA Jam video game [they have a new version out now] there were two frequently repeated phrases in the game. “He’s on fire!” and “He can’t buy a bucket!” – we were on fire last night. Let’s hope that fire continues.

The credentials for the previous year had exactly that – some flame action going on. Here are a handful of the credentials, as well as a look into the process of coming up with them.

How much flame is too much flame? Where does “Staff” and the year go? Believe me, there were plenty more iterations than just the few shown here.

On a few of the credentials we went with wood from the court, but should it be Arizona red or more like the original wood?

A day after the University of Arizona men’s basketball team became the PAC-10 champions and finished an undeafeated season at home I happened to bump into a friend visiting from  Cincinnati. He works with the athletes at Xavier where we pulled their coach. “Thanks for letting us have you coach,” I gleefully told him. Who would have thought that Arizona would be back to being competitive so quickly? Not I. We are back to the big dance, and who knows — maybe we will put in another 25 year string of appearances.

Each year we get to create the credentials for many of Arizona’s teams, and we put a bit more into the job as it is our team as well. In the end, there are individual credentials for a myriad of positions and sets for both season-long and game-by-game passes. If you are thinking of being sneaky, good luck with that — not only do we shred everything that we don’t ship, but we create identification sheets for the security members at the games. Did we mention that we also apply barcodes on credentials? We want everything surrounding the games to be safe, as well as look good [because that is what we do].

Good luck in both the PAC-10 Tournament as well as the big dance — here is hoping that we at least make it into the sweet sixteen!