SEATTLE – It may come as a surprise to some, or even most Washington fans, that Chris Petersen nor any other athletic department official considered incorporating the key mantra of the Huskies head football coach into the new apparel partnership with Adidas.

Down in Los Angeles at Pac-12 Media Day I approached Petersen with a half question, half spit-balling idea: had he considered incorporating his Built for Life slogan with Three Stripe Life?

In short, no.

“I have never heard of that,” he responded. “Three Stripe Life. Built for Life. You guys should … I try to – you know we turn this into Built for Life, O.K.G. I try not to make it slogan-y.”

Sitting with a handful of reports during lunch Petersen revealed a little known fact at the time back in July. One of his former players had done some custom shoe designs for the UW head coach several months prior to media day.

Midway through fall camp UW released a video that depicted a ‘Day in the Life’ of Petersen.

His early morning boat ride across Lake Washington, coaching meetings . . . and a never before seen wall of personalized Adidas shoes including his one-of-a-kind pair of Yeezy’s.

“When I got my pair of Yeezy’s I knew I had to do something special with them, besides wear them,” Petersen said with a smile last Friday after practice.

Sean Vergara, a former walk-on defensive back who earned a scholarship prior to his senior season in 2018, is the mastermind with exquisite ability to design.

Vergara designed the personal pair of Yeezy’s for Petersen and seven other pairs of Adidas shoes that sit on a wall inside the football operations offices inside Husky Stadium. Each with a certain touch, be it to the Polynesian culture at UW or the purple camouflage pair.

However, both share the same choice for their favorite pair on the wall.

“I think my favorite pair was his – the skyline. That’s obviously a fun shoe to work on,” Vergara told TheDawgReport.com.

“Something like that hasn’t been done on any kind of shoe before. Finding a way to, because these are a hard shoe to design. To find a way to customize them is hard to do. But the challenge of finding a cool way to do them, and I think they came out really well.”

Vergara has designed well north of 500 pairs over the years. The pair of white Yeezy shoes took only a couple of hours over the course of a day. As he described the process of working the pair for Petersen specifically, one realization emerged that made Vergara the perfect fit to hand a tough task.

Since day one on the job dating back to his introductory press conference in December 2013, Petersen has used the word ‘detail’ or the phrase ‘focusing on the details’ more than any other.

When it came to finding the right angle to tackle the design, Vergara said, it was managing the details that proved to be the toughest challenge.

“For every shoe it really depends, based on the materials and what you have to do before you can start painting,” he said.

“They’re not difficult to prep and once you start painting it’s not super hard. But the material they’re made out of makes it hard to do details. Like small, intricate stuff like I did on those.”

One can easily picture how Petersen would respond to the nature of managing details, and realize that the white base didn’t require much color.

“It wasn’t a ton of colors. Just put purple on a white base,” Vergara said. “So the process of it when pretty quickly. Just finding the perfect fit, the perfect design fit was the challenging part.”

The sneaker head of the Husky Coaching Staff

During his playing days it wasn’t uncommon for fellow UW teammates to approach Vergara. It’s been no different now that his time in shoulder pads is over.

Petersen and Vergara both confirmed that the former first approached the latter with the idea for making the head coach a custom designed pair. However, he wasn’t the first coach to make a request.

Keith Bhonapha, the Huskies running backs coach and native of Oakland, California, had Vergara make some corn hole boards for his wife, Julie. The boards featured themes related to the coaches’ hometown.

Most recently Bhonapha asked Vergara to restore a pair of Jordan’s that he owns. One 2020 recruit who has since committed to another school told TheDawgReport.com over the summer – prior to the official switch over from Nike to Adidas in July – that the Huskies assistant is fond of Nike shoes.

Vergara has not met first-year wide receivers coach Junior Adams, who may quickly have already become the unofficial sneaker head of the UW coaching staff.