Photo by Owen Wong ’23

By Owen Wong ’23

With Super Bowl LVII coming to Glendale this year, schools and communities all over Maricopa have been involved in the event in various ways. Over the past few months, Ms. Abbey Withey has been working on an art project for the occasion. 

“I get approached every once in a while for projects,” said Ms. Withey. “I got approached in November by the host committee for the Arizona Super Bowl and they wanted to do a commission of footballs that we custom and hand painted as gifts for the Arizona Economic Impact committee.”

For context, there’s typically a committee for economic impact every year for the Super Bowl due to large influxes of tourists and visitors. With Arizona handling the Super Bowl this year as well as several other big events, there has indeed been a huge increase in people around Maricopa county, so the committee has been working to adjust.

Alongside the Arizona Economic Impact committee, the custom footballs are to be given to CEOs of big companies, investors, etc. 

According to Ms. Withey, the original idea was either to custom paint football helmets or footballs. She went through a process of negotiations on how many there were going to be as well as a design process with the client. 

“We ended up settling on 96 hand-painted footballs, half the football, with two panels painted out of four,” Ms. Withey said. “Then we did the design process, a couple sketches went back and forth, worked with their team to finalize all that, and then eventually we decided on the design.” 

Shortly after Ms. Withey had started working on the 96 footballs, the order was brought up to 120 footballs, after the client made the decision to give some to the owners of the coming teams. 

“We started work Dec. 17, the first day we got out for break. These will all be turned in to the client Feb. 6,” said Ms. Withey.

Come Super Bowl Sunday, Brophy will be well-represented on the field as the game kicks off.