For Brian Gudalis, football – and Pittsburgh – has come full circle.
At first blush, you might not be able to tell, but Gudalis leaves his mark on every Steelers’ game. You just have to know where to look. Founder of the company treDCAL, Gudalis and his team make customized thigh pads designs. And a whole shipment of them just got sent the Steelers way.
You might have known without even knowing. Weeks ago, CBS Sports sent out this photo of T.J. Watt walking to a game with his patented sack celebration, a high leg kick, outlined on his thigh pad.
That was from Gudalis. And really, it was from Nick Herbig. An early Christmas gift, Herbig reached out to Gudalis to order a shipment of customized designs for the Steelers’ entire defensive line room, each item telling a story about each player. You can see them all in the above photo. A closer look shows Cam Heyward’s Iron Head, in honor of late his father who wore the nickname.
Or Isaiahh Loudermilk, a milk carton with his jersey number on it.
All provided by treDCAL. While the Steelers’ shipment didn’t take long to arrive to the team, Gudalis idea was decades in the making.
Born in Punxsutawney who moved to nearby DuBois when he was two, Gudalis loved sports growing up. Football, basketball, baseball, though he preferred the latter two. More games, fewer practices. After graduating college, he worked as a YMCA Director. Until he got a call one day to take a different path. And to a different state.
“Out of the blue I got a call one time,” Gudalis tells me in an interview earlier this week.” And they said, ‘hey, do you want to teach PE and coach? This was on a Friday. I got the call, I was working full-time. My wife’s a PE teacher, they said, we have another job in our school district down here in Murray, Kentucky that opened up. And so we have her slated for an interview too, if you both want to come. We accepted the jobs on a Friday and moved to Murray, Kentucky site unseen on Monday.”
He took the leap, moving from Ohio to Kentucky for a new opportunity. Now a middle school coach and teacher, it was there he first hatched the idea for a customized thigh pad design.
“A kid had slid, you could see some grass stains and you could clearly see the three lines of the thigh pad. And in my mind I just remember thinking, I don’t know why they have those three lines there. And then I thought, well shoot, if they’ve got three lines, we can make those lines into any anything we want. What if we move the lines around? What if we put numbers? In my mind that starts getting going from that point forward. Honestly, every time I would see a football game, I would just think about it.”
Though it was often top of mind, Gudalis didn’t just quit his job and start making thigh pads. But he did change career paths again, attending law school in his mid-to-late 20s. For the next decade, law and cheering on Penn State had his focus. Until one night, he finally decided to put his idea in action.
“It was probably eight or nine o’clock at night. I was at work and I thought, ‘heck with this, I’m gonna figure this thing out’…the next day, I went to Michaels and I bought some foam and I bought an X-ACTO knife. That was one of the things I bought. I had bought a bunch of different stuff. I’d bought some ways to put a glue into it, a jelly into it. Many ideas did not work. They just didn’t work at all. They were too heavy. They burst, all that stuff. I cut the foam out, I cut an Alabama ‘A’ out and put it under a pair of pants. And it worked really well.”
Alabama was his first logo. Kentucky was the first school to show interest. Local to the area, the Wildcats were an easy team to test the product on. At first, just a decal that stuck to the thigh pad. Players quickly took to the concept, first wearing them in a 2013 game against Mississippi State. Schools around the country began to take notice.
“Michigan State called us and said, hey, I really like this idea. And so Michigan State jumped on board. That’s when they were going through their run in the Big Ten. They jumped on board that first year. I think we ended up having eight colleges that jumped on board to at least wear it in some capacity.”
With the business quickly growing, Gudalis decided to manufacture his own thigh plates. In a world of “look good, feel good,” the endless design possibilities are an obvious appeal to players. TreDCAL can make virtually any design, crosses being the company’s most popular choice. Many others get outlines honoring their children. But there’s a practical and safety incentive for the players. Choosing their design makes them more likely to wear them in practice (though they are NFL mandated for games), protecting their bodies all the more. The Steelers know that first-hand.
“I got pictures of Joe Haden who doesn’t wanna wear thigh pads in practice when there’s no pads on. [Now], he has his thigh plates on. They look good. They’re comfortable, they really are. So I think it helps the NFL in a way of, these guys are wanting to wear thigh pads now.”
And because treDCAL manufactures their own, they can fully customize each order.
“We have the ability to put the foam on the backside of it to make it as thick as you want, as thin as you want, as big as you want. And the nice thing about that is when you look at the Steelers. For example, T.J. Watt, he just wears a plastic plate. That’s all he likes. But if you look at [Cam] Heyward, Heyward has more of the traditional thigh pad. His is a half-inch thick of foam on the backside of it. And the foam’s a little wider than the plate as well. The nice thing about that is we can do something for T.J. that he’s comfortable with and completely transform it to something that Heyward’s comfortable with. And we can do everything in-between.”
At Kentucky, the first player to ever wear Gudalis’ product was, funny enough, future Steeler Bud Dupree. The first in the NFL? Running back Jordan Howard. After shipping them up to Philadelphia, Gudalis wasn’t sure if Howard was actually going to wear them.
“I’m literally just sitting in my living room one day. We’re watching the game flipping through and there was Jordan Howard. And you could see he was wearing them. It was a good day in our household.”
From there, NFL interest grew and today, scores of players wear them, including star names like Dallas Cowboys WR CeeDee Lamb. LB Kwon Alexander sported them for years. And it’s likely where Herbig got the idea to grab some not just for himself, but as a gift to the rest of the defensive line and outside linebacker room. He reached out to Gudalis to bounce ideas off each other for each player’s outline. While not explicitly stated, Gudalis believes they were a surprise present to Herbig’s teammates.
The designs aren’t cookie-cutter either. Carefully crafted and researched, each has its own special meaning. Like NT Breiden Fehoko.
“We took his tattoo and we did the research on it…it’s the different tribes. It’s pretty cool. And there’s a lot of thought into it. The ocean waves and the relevance for that. So what we did is we took the tattoo from his arm and basically mimicked it on the thigh pad with the important parts of it.”
A close-up of the finished product.
And for Herbig, the Shaka sign as a nod to his Hawaiian roots.
For the Steelers, there was no obligation to wear them. Arriving on October 20th, Gudalis didn’t know if they’d like them enough to use them in a game. But after a week, Watt wore his, picked up by CBS Sports and going viral. You can see Highsmith come out of the tunnel sporting his, too.
Like a nuanced route running receiver or heady linebacker who knows the job of everyone else on the field, Gudalis, who once dreamed of becoming an artist, takes pride in his craft and attention to detail.
“There’s so many things you can do with art that people don’t even realize it’s art. I think this is just the way I like to do it. I really enjoy putting the extra time in. I’ve taught myself how to do AutoCAD. I’ve taught myself Photoshop. I’ve taught myself all that stuff so I can kind of take and morph those things together to try to get the best image. And on top of that, I just really enjoy that personalization part of it. Of how can I take an idea that’s abstract, that’s in writing, and put that into one picture.”
For the boy from Punxsutawney, who grew up a black and gold die-hard amazed by Franco Harris, Lynn Swann, and John Stallworth, Gudalis now makes his mark on every Steelers’ game.
