#PeopleFirst Friday: JR Bryant
A true “sneakerhead,” Experiential Operations Coordinator JR Bryant came into the hobby in a unique way – through his mother, who coached basketball at a variety of levels while he was growing up.
“My mom wasn’t an avid collector, but she’s been coaching for as long as I can remember, so she’s always had multiple pairs of sneakers, and she would change her shoes a lot,” he said. “I remember going to her games and seeing her closet where she would have two or three new pairs of shoes, and then four or five months later, she’d have four new pairs in the box, and that quickly can add up.”
Bryant would start “truly” collecting in high school, slowly building a collection of more than 100 pairs of sneakers, mostly Air Jordan “1’s,” one of his favorite styles of shoe.
His first pair in his collection was a pair of Columbia Blue Jordan 11’s that he got in middle school. He’s since outgrown the shoes but refuses to part with them.
“I can’t wear that pair anymore because my feet are too big, but I can’t get rid of them,” Bryant said. “They’re still somewhere at my mom’s house.”
While his collection grew slowly at first, once Bryant got to college and started working, earning “adult money” for the first time, his sneaker hobby really took off. While a lot of exclusive sneaker drops are done through mobile apps now, Bryant recalls a time where he spent 12 hours camping outside of a mall in South Carolina to secure a pair of sneakers.
“I had so many pairs of shoes at one point in college that my closet in my dorm room collapsed,” Bryant said, laughing. “The little wire rack that they gave you, it completely caved in.”
Through his hobby, Bryant has been able to find a community in sneaker culture. A member of the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. at Claflin University, he is part of an “unofficial” group that was formed after a national Fraternity group chat got tired of them talking about sneakers all the time.
“We call ourselves the Sneakerhead Alphas,” Bryant said. “It’s a tight-knit community of about 50 of my Fraternity brothers from across the country. Sometimes when you’re not even looking to get a particular pair of sneakers, it’s just the closeness of it all that makes that community everything. Even if it’s a pair of sneakers that you don’t like, you’ll enter a raffle for someone else, just because we’ll all help each other. They scratch your back, you’ll scratch their back.”
The Sneakerhead Alphas aren’t just into the hobby for themselves, though. There’s also a charitable component.
“We probably do like three or four big giveaways a year,” Bryant said. “We’ll raise and collect money for shoes to donate or contribute to Christmas funds. It’s a good way to give back.”