For as long as I can remember, I have been a Washington Redskins fan! Growing up in a Redskins/Cowboys household, there was only one logical choice in which team I would be a fan of. My favorite players on the team were Cornerback Darrell Green, but most of all, wide receiver, Art Monk. I idolized him as a kid, and he inspired me to play football. I didn’t play as much as I would’ve liked, a couple years in Pee-Wee and a couple years in High School. Needless to say, I ‘passed’ on the football player career in favor of chasing clouds.

Still though, my love for the team, despite how horrible they were in my adult years (good riddance Dan Snyder), held strong. Art Monk would play for Washington through the 1993 season before he was traded and spent his last couple years on other teams before retiring. In 2008, he’d be elected into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, an event I was privileged to witness first hand, seeing both my Washington idols going in together with my Dad was a high point in my life. After he retired, he remained my favorite player, and of course, I would own multiple jerseys of his through high school into college. But I’d only wear it on game days.

Fast forward to March 2004, a conference in Iowa. It was one of my first major Meteorological conferences, the Severe Storms and Doppler Radar Conference. I traveled out solo from Denver and met with several friends there. As I was young and still fairly green, I thought it would be cool if I ended up on TV knowing that several networks, including The Weather Channel, would be there. I brought the jersey with the intention to stand out among the crowd should I end up on TV. That opportunity never came about, because…

Midway through the conference, a chase setup was looming in Oklahoma. My friends, Blake and Keith, along with Carl Young and Tim Samaras, all coordinated to leave the conference early to make a run for the setup. Well, seeing is all I packed was jerseys, that would be my attire for this early 2004 chase event. And by the end of the event, I had witnessed three tornadoes.

Now, it didn’t click with that chase… but several chases after all yielded pretty marginal outcomes, including a big miss on May 10. With another big looming on the 12th, I though, “ya know, it worked once”. So on May 12 in Kansas, I wore the jersey, and the seven tornadoes I saw STILL didn’t convince me it was enough.

But a dozen-plus tornadoes on my next big chase on May 29 cemented it. From that point forward, every chase I would wear the Art Monk jersey.

When I was invited to be part of the Discovery Channel TV series, “Storm Chasers” in 2009 as part of the ‘Team TWISTEX’, I of course had to wear the jersey!  The entire first season, I ran around the Plains wearing #81.  There was even a small segment dedicated to the luck of my jersey in one of the season 3 episodes.  As a gift to me for graduating with my Meteorology Degree in May 2009, the entire TWISTEX team wore the jerseys (I had accumulated many by this point seeing as I was wearing them almost daily while chasing).

Unfortunately, there were some… issues… with the jersey and Discovery Channel, leading to the “kind request” to ditch the jerseys for something not so much needing a license (or paying a fee) to wear.  The trade off was garb that showed my hometown pride, Circleville High School clothes, but still with the #81 on the back to keep the luck alive.  That began the changeover, which honestly wasn’t so bad as the jerseys were a bit heavy, particularly later in the season when it got really warm.

The shirts stuck, particularly during filming, but I’d still get out in the jersey whenever possible.  The final season with ‘Storm Chasers’, I was asked to find something more subtle, so I went from my high school colors of red and black to a more muted green, still with the #81.  Not that it mattered as I never made an appearance in the final season of filming, but alas, the #81 continued.

After El Reno in 2013, I left my original jersey at the TWISTEX memorial site.  It would be weathered away over the years, likely much to the happiness of Tim, whom was not a Washington fan haha  Through the rest of 2010s, I would rotate the more comfortable shirts with jerseys, but always wearing #81 where I could.

The #81 is semi-retired now as I have become more full time as a professional storm chaser for various news outlets, and it didn’t fit the ‘look’ and branding of whom I was representing.  However, it still finds its way out of the closet on occasion, most recently when I accepted two awards at the 2024 National Storm Chaser Summit where I took home both video and photo of the year honors for my Akron tornado intercept.  Twenty years later, at a conference, I would indeed stand out… only this time, the jersey was an afterthought…