Tip-off was more than 24 hours away, but Dan Shworles needed to find a laundromat.

It was sometime at about 7 a.m. on March 15, 2018, hours after Syracuse beat Arizona State in the NCAA Tournament. The team’s charter plane landed in Detroit, and players headed to bed before practice later that day. Awaiting Shworles, though, were dirty jerseys, warmups, compression shorts and towels to wash.

At 3 a.m., SU filed into a Detroit Marriott. Shworles slept for about three hours, then loaded a hotel courtesy van with bags of dirty clothes, drove a few blocks and filled up the washer machines. Players had to wear fresh practice attire and jerseys over the next two days.

As an assistant equipment manager at Syracuse, Shworles juggles dozens of jobs at once. He works with a number of SU teams, including men’s basketball, and directs the equipment room in the Carmelo K. Anthony Basketball Center. He’s been at SU for nearly half of head coach Jim Boeheim’s head-coaching tenure, and has been a hidden piece of Syracuse’s everyday process.

“He’s done a great job for us,” Boeheim said last Monday. “He works hard and he’s really devoted to trying to get everything right every day.”

Matthew  Gutierrez | Senior Staff Writer

Shworles knows he can’t forget anything: Players need their shoes and jerseys to play games. He scrubs stained jerseys. He packs up everybody’s towels, water bottles and shoes. He transports their bags. He begins every day at 8 a.m. and, on SU men’s basketball game nights, doesn’t get home until around 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. Some days, he’s busy for 15 to 20 hours straight.

Shworles started with Syracuse in fall 2001. He knows equipment managers aren’t the most glamorous members of a team’s cast, but they spend the most amount of time around the facility, players and coaches said. While his role precludes some tasks — the managers set up practice and rebound for players — he’s responsible for the bulk of game-day setup and equipment.

“He’s always running around somewhere with stuff in his hands,” joked Andrew Clary, the SU men’s basketball team security guard.

Before games, Shworles has a slew of chores. At 3:57 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 5, four hours before No. 22 Florida State tipped-off against SU, he walked through a set of double doors in the Carrier Dome. Inside the SU locker room, he strolled to a rack of basketballs. Using a TorrX ball pump,  he checked the pressure of each basketball before warm ups. The goal: about eight pounds of pressure per square inch.

Shortly after 4 p.m., Shworles pushed the rack of basketballs onto the court. He left them at half court — where he sits during games — then returned to the locker room to check on the towels. Stripes of tape held together a stack of clean white towels. “Florida State 1st half bench,” he wrote in black sharpie across one bundle. He picked up two bundles and tossed them on his left shoulder.

An hour earlier, he walked up to the doorway, where a couple of security guards greeted him. One asked him what his plans were on Friday. “I’ll be doing laundry,” he said.

At 3:26 p.m., Shworles said his most important tasks came: He zipped open the team shoe bag and took out two pairs of shoes for each player, laying them on the bottom of each locker. Then he hung each player’s jersey — each white and unwrinkled — plus their warmup shirts.

“In the equipment world, we have a saying: it’s set everything up, then wait,” Shworles said.

Still in the SU locker room, he walked a small white towel and two black markers over to a table beside a white board. He laid down both markers.

“I bring two in case he (Boeheim) throws one,” Shworles said. “He’s done that before.”

In a half-hour span before the game, his phone buzzed twice. One call came from an SU track and field coach who wanted to know when the team equipment could be ready for a road trip the next morning.

Players said they associate Shworles with not only long hours, but also team apparel. Lots of it. After a team meal at the 2016 Sweet 16 in Chicago, Shworles surprised the team with new special edition Nike shoes and socks. He also designed and handed out “Pearl” script shirts players wore in 2016 to honor the late Pearl Washington, a Syracuse star from 1983-86.

He regards no task as beneath him or too minor. Regardless of SU men’s basketball schedule, Shworles might not go home to his wife, Savannah, until after midnight. Walk-on Antonio Balandi recalled a night early this season when he swiped himself into the team’s practice facility to shoot around. It was 2 a.m. Yet there was Shworles, pushing a cart of dirty laundry.

“Man,” Balandi said. “He has one of the hardest jobs in the program.”

Published on February 21, 2019 at 9:16 am

Contact Matthew: [email protected] | @MatthewGut21