Block-‘O’ North celebrates Breast Cancer Awareness month during the Ohio State-Maryland game on Oct. 9, 2021. Ohio State won 66-17.
Credit: Mackenzie Shanklin | Lantern File Photo
During the first half of every Ohio State home football game, spectators can see students in Block O’s North and South sections display designs made of hundreds of 18-by-18-inch cards.
The students only display the designs for about 45 seconds, but the process of putting the card stunts together takes hours of planning, organizing and execution.
Each Monday before every home game, the task of making a card stunt begins. The Block O football committee — led by director Adam Smith — meets, discusses ideas and eventually settles on designs for its north and south sections.
“I like to have everybody on my committee be able to design stunts,” Smith, a second-year in marketing and finance, said. “If I was the only one designing stunts, you’d get one perspective. So, just being able to bounce ideas off of everybody and having that flexibility for everybody really opens up creativity and gets the best out of us.”
Block O’s stacks of cards, housed underneath the South stand bleachers at Ohio Stadium. Credit: Reid Murray | Design Editor
Avery Hooser, a fourth-year in sport industry, has designed stunts for Ohio State’s matchups with Youngstown State, Western Kentucky and Maryland so far this season and said her brainstorming process begins before the football committee formally meets.
“We normally start throwing ideas around a week before in our group chats, and then from there, I spend the week before thinking about all the different ways we could take a team’s logo or just something funny we could play off of and go from there,” Hooser said.
Once the committee settles on an idea, the design goes into an Excel template, where the designer goes square by square, creating a pixelated blueprint, Smith said.
Smith explained what factors Block O members consider when putting together designs.
“It’s not the easiest thing in the world, because you’re working with squares to make a picture, so it’s going to look a little pixelated,” Smith said. “For the most part, we try and stick to simple designs. I make sure that there isn’t anything one-card wide so it shows up better. We work with shadowing, make things pop better and just make sure that there’s nothing crazy.”
Avery Hooser (right) sorts cards with two other Block O football committee members in preparation for the Oct. 7 card stunt. Credit: Reid Murray | Design Editor
After the design is finalized in Excel — a process Hooser said takes about an hour — the football committee begins assembling the stunt with real cards at Ohio Stadium Friday afternoon.
Block O has thousands of cards in a variety of colors — mostly scarlet, gray, white and black — stored underneath the bleachers of the south stands in Ohio Stadium. Early in the afternoon each Friday, Smith unlocks the storage unit and the committee begins to clean and sort the cards.
Smith works with between five and 10 committee members to remove excess tape from the cards and place them into stacks based on color.
After spending roughly three hours preparing the cards on Friday, the Block O crew returns to the stadium four hours before kickoff the following Saturday to lay each card out in its position.
The completed template for Block O South’s Marvin Harrison Jr.-inspired card stunt for the Buckeyes’ matchup with Maryland Oct. 7. Credit: Reid Murray | Design Editor
“We do teams of two; somebody gets a tape gun, somebody goes out in front and lays them out, and then just kind of row by row, whatever row’s open, you go do,” Smith said. “I’ve got a really good committee. They’re efficient on game days. They know what they’re supposed to do, they come in and they do it.”
Auggie Stallman, a fourth-year in health sciences, designed the Block O South stunt for the Oct. 7 game against Maryland — an homage to Marvin Harrison Jr. — and said he’s willing to dedicate so much time and energy to the process because of the community he has in Block O.
“I would say it’s a worthwhile experience because you get to work with a lot of different people, and also just the love of the sport,” Stallman said. “I love football and I grew up watching Ohio State football.”
