Now that it’s been almost six months after my original blog post, I think it’s finally time to look back at the basketball court designs I created to mimic the University of Oregon’s monstrosity.

From ESPN copying my idea, the University of Arizona Athletic Director sharing my blog on Twitter, to the magazine Ducks Illustrated reprinting the designs without my permission, this has indeed been a wild ride. I still feel weird seeing the words “Jake Donahue” in an article on Sports Illustrated’s website – I always thought it would have been a by-line back when I was an aspiring sports writer.

Lastly, before we look back (especially when trying to gauge how big this blew up), I think it’s worth noting that if you type “NIKE BASKETBALL COURTS” into Google, this blog shows up No. 2 … ahead of 2.2 million other pages. Since I’m in the business of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), I can tell you that is no small feat. It is all thanks to the hundreds of websites linking to those basketball courts, as well as the thousands of people who saw the article on Yahoo!, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, Fox Sports and more.

Viral? Uh, yeah.

The Story

I could rewrite the whole reason I even started this project, but Jeff Eisenburg at Yahoo! Sport’s Rivals.com wrote it quite well himself in the original article:

In case Oregon’s crazy new basketball floor ever becomes a trend throughout college basketball, freelance designer Jake Donahue has a few ideas on what other designs we might see.

The original article that Jeff Eisenberg wrote for Yahoo! Sport’s Rivals.com

Donahue put his enviable photoshop skills to work this week, creating eight potential new floors including a palm tree-framed court at Miami, a KFC logo-splashed court for Louisville and a Vegas-inspired court for UNLV.

A lifelong Oregon State and Gonzaga fan who grew up hating the Ducks, Donahue said his intent was to make the courts as gaudy and ugly as possible in order to parody Oregon’s new orange and tan fir tree-framed floor. As a designer, he appreciates the originality of Oregon’s court, but as a basketball fan he hates how distracting it is for players and TV viewers.

“I was watching a game the other day on TV from Matthew Knight Arena and thought it was the worst thing to ever happen to a televised basketball game,” Donahue wrote via email. “You can’t see the half-court line and the reflections from the arena’s digital reader board glares horribly on the floor.”

The Reaction

I had no idea how big it would go from there. Within hours, the article was listed on the main page for Yahoo! Sports. That, alone, was as big as I thought it could be – and I was so jacked for just that. Then I received a phone call from a friend who asked if I had seen the main homepage for Yahoo.com. I had not.

Low and behold, the No. 1 story on Yahoo! was Jeff’s article about my court designs. Needless to say, I was stunned.

Soon after, other websites followed suit. Some simply copied the article and images entirely, while others (like NBC Sports) just took my quotes and wrote their own versions of the story. As a journalist, I had a tough time watching so many other news outlets completely rip off the article, as I would have never done anything like that when I worked for a newspaper. But as a young designer trying to launch my media company, it was awesome to see so many websites out there writing about me and linking to my website.

Unfortunately, the happiest and one of the angriest moments I experienced during the whole ordeal came from the same company whom I’ve always adored: ESPN. I freaked out when I saw that @ESPN_CollHoops mentioned my personal blog post on their twitter account. I was even more surprised when they shared the designs on their Facebook page.

But the excitement vanished when I saw that one of their writers completely stole my idea and created his own courts for ESPN.com’s Page 2. I found solace in the fact that his designs were downright horrible, and slowly grew less angry when another reader penned a comment about “ripping off this guy’s idea” (he linked to my blog post).

Things started looking up again when I saw this tweet from the actual Adobe Photoshop Twitter Feed:

One of the schools whose court I redesigned (LSU) even released a Twitter disclaimer saying they were not responsible for the designs.

In the midst of all this, I was reading one of the blogs I periodically peruse (an offshoot of ESPN’s Uniform Watchdog: UniWatch) and saw my name:

Jake Donahue has envisioned what some college basketball courts might look like if they went with an Oregon-style approach.

Ducks Illustrated (Magazine) – Unauthorized Reproduction

One of the biggest things I worried about with all the new publicity I was getting (my website was hit over 20,000 times in the ensuing weeks from almost 90 separate countries) was some sort of copyright

infringement. After all, I was toying with the actual logos from eight major universities – as well as Oregon’s court that had been paid for by Nike. I had been assured my many professionals that since I wasn’t making any money from the designs and created them in jest, I was in the clear. I felt better after noticing all the other blogs and website that flat out stole Yahoo!’s article about me.

I mean, it’s not like any magazine or newspaper was printing the story…

Actually, I was wrong. As it turned out, a little magazine dedicated to the University of Oregon named Ducks Illustrated ripped off the entire thing. They reprinted Jeff’s article and published three of my court designs — without anybody’s permission. I’m still in the process of seeing what sort of action I should take, if any, as there is indeed some sort copyright infringement.

Other Highlights

Like I said earlier, my website ended up getting hit over 20,000 times after the article showed up on Yahoo! Sports. Heading into March Madness, the link was shared on hundreds of websites, including ESPN Radio and countless school-specific forums.

When Mike Miller shared it on Twitter and then wrote a piece for NBC Sports, it made it to their homepage, as well. It even eventually landed on the MSNBC homepage, though they only shared the headline (I never saw this personally, but was told by a handful of people).

I then found out Luke Winn mentioned the Louisville court on his weekly Power Rankings for Sports Illustrated. Unlike ESPN’s Page 2 author, however, Winn gave me credit before working on his own design (I removed the top 14 teams in his article or this screenshot would have been extremely long):

Remember when I said the University of Arizona Athletic Director shared my blog on Twitter? I wasn’t joking:

Since my favorite collegiate basketball team is Gonzaga, it was a huge honor when their Associate Athletic Director threw this up on Twitter:

I contemplated creating another slew of designs for the NCAA Tournament. But since I hadn’t made a single penny from the original article, I calculated that the amount of time to design 68 more courts (minus a few of the originals since those schools made the tournament) would prevent me from doing any actual real work. I decided to at least create courts for any team that made the Sweet 16. Jeff at Yahoo! agreed, and said that based on the reaction of the original designs he would more than likely write another post sharing the new designs.

Unfortunately, work got in the way. I just didn’t have the time to spend over 30 hours and create 15 new courts (not 16, as Arizona made the Sweet 16).

My Favorite Part

It was indeed a wild ride. I’ve since had people clamoring, “Why don’t you design basketball courts professionally?” The answer to that is simple: No basketball court should ever have a design like these … especially the University of Oregon. Furthermore, I was just playing around in Photoshop a few nights when I had nothing better to do; Oregon paid Nike to come up with their floor, which if you ignore the part about watching basketball on it, is actually a pretty sweet design.

All in all, my favorite part about everything was definitely the comments around the web. Yes, there were some haters who thought I sucked and that the designs were terrible, but that was originally my point — to create the most gaudy courts I could, mimicking the Ducks. Even better were the people who believed their school was actually going to implement one of these designs. One lady said she might not let her daughter attend UNLV if the school actually put strippers on the basketball court. Seriously?

I guess it’s also pretty sweet to say I was on some of the biggest websites in the world. And I’m not joking about Googling “Nike Basketball Courts.” Try it.