Dreaming of a Verde keeper kit: one fan's quest for a special piece of merchandise

Brad Tillery is obsessed. 

He’s a lifelong sports fan who grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, where college football is king. Before coming to Austin in May 2011, he spent four years in Michigan doing play-by-play for a minor league baseball team. Then, when he got to Austin, he described himself as “indifferent” to living in the city, regarding it as just a cool town among many cool towns, but one lacking the pro sports he craved. 

Fast forward to the recent past, in which Austin FC announced its arrival, he bought season tickets and found kindred spirits in the Los Verdes supporters group. Tillery now says “It’s the first time in nearly a decade of living here that I've really felt connected to the city.” 

But what’s he’s really obsessed with is the verde goalkeeper’s kit he saw Brad Stuver wear in the Austin squad’s March 25 scrimmage against Louisville City FC. 

Ever since then, the 37-year-old fan has embarked on a personal Twitter campaign to get Austin FC to release the verde keeper kit. 

“If you look at it closely,” said Tillery, indicating just how closely he's focused in on the tweeted photo, “there's this wood grain look through it ... it almost looks like the inside of an oak.” 

Tillery started his campaign offhandedly with a single tweet approving Stuver’s kit among the preseason match photos Austin FC shared. 

By Day 2, he’d labeled his tweet “Day 2,” indicating a campaign was on, and set upon a schedule of daily tweets. 

On Day 6, he invoked the club’s Minister of Culture, Matthew McConaughey, with an iconic line from "Dazed and Confused." 

(Tillery, in tribute to that movie, opted for Wooderson and the number 76 on the back of his ATXFC away kit.)  

By Day 7, he moved into haiku. 

On Day 13, he found his inner Ken Burns with an old-timey battlefront-letter-as-tweet. 

And this morning, the day after Austin FC’s social media team publicly acknowledged his campaign, he rounded up some of his Los Verdes friends to create a send-up of J.G. Wentworth commercials, with his wife Kerry providing the video edits. 

He also credits her with the concept, as they’ve gotten to the stage in which they’re collaborating on what he might post next. 

And the video was good enough for Stuver himself to give props to his fellow Brad. 

So far, the campaign hasn’t produced a goalkeepers’ kit, even though he’s consistently posted for 19 days — only deleting Day 5 at Kerry’s urging because it featured his vaccination card, and she didn’t feel that was a wise move. 

The Striker Texas understands that there will be no keeper kits made for sale, according to a club source. Only a select number of teams carry goalkeeper kits among their offerings on MLSStore.com, though one of the 2021 options is a Minnesota United FC kit in a green not so far afield from the kit that Tillery covets.

He claims that he saw an XL version of his desired kit go up on eBay recently, and bid for it, but bowed out when it hit the $200 mark before going for $237.50. But that only convinced him that there’s a market for keeper jereseys, and that has inspired him to keep going. 

How long is he going to carry on, though? He laughed, “As long as it goes,” adding, “I think like a minor league baseball marketing guy half the time.”  

“I mean, it takes me five minutes to put a tweet out every day,” he reflected. “Even if something never gets released, at least people are engaged and having fun, and it's something different. It shows the culture of the city and the culture of this fanbase.”