Heartland - The Home Field Advantage

There's something sport does that almost nothing else can. Not any particular team, not any single season, but sport itself, as a kind of shared human practice. The way it creates identity out of thin air. A couple colors, a name, and a ritual repeated across generations.... and suddenly a group of strangers has something in common that feels anything but arbitrary. It feels, somehow, innately kindred.

And maybe that’s why it’s been on my mind lately—because in a time when so much feels unstable, sport is one of the few places where people still reliably show up together.

You see it everywhere in Kansas City. From the ubiquitous Charlie Hustle heart tee, to Made Mobb's crave-worthy limited drops, to just about everything at Made in KC... this city, divided by rivers and a state line, is remarkably unified. Not just in its love for its sports teams, but in the identity those teams have helped build. The red and yellow. The blue and gold. The teal and red. Colors that carry real, shared meaning to people who may agree on very little else.

Working remotely, I don't get out of the house as much as I used to. So when I do, I notice how much change has come to our city, even in the few years I've been back here. With the 2026 FIFA World Cup on the horizon, streets are torn up, cranes are swinging overhead, and everything feels like it's inching toward something bigger. It's definitely an exciting time to be in the Heartland... and sport, in its way, is at the center of it again. A reminder that this former "fly-over" city is alive and thriving, whether the rest of the world is paying attention yet or not.

Even as so many once-predictable things — work, the world, even the weather — feel like they're shifting underneath us, certain things remain stubbornly, reassuringly constant. And for me, lately, one of those constants has been baseball.

There's something about the return of baseball season that feels grounding in a way that's hard to articulate but easy to feel. The fresh air. The rhythm. The reliability of the experience. Clear rules, applied consistently, day after day, at a time when that doesn't always feel like the case elsewhere in life. Somewhere in the country, there is always a game being played. There is always a count, an inning, a score. The structure holds.

I say all this as a relatively casual observer... someone who finds comfort in the presence of the game more than a devoted follower of any particular team's fortunes. But maybe that's exactly the point. Experiencing the beneficial impact of sport doesn't require devotion... it only requires showing up. Being present, alongside other people who are doing the same thing, all of you temporarily organized around something larger than any one of you.

Not everything has to be optimized, disrupted, automated, or reimagined. Some things just need to be shared.

As designers, I find that we talk about community a lot. We reference it in our proposals. We diagram it in our process decks. We cite it in award submissions. We design for it — or at least we say we do. But sport might be one of the most honest versions of community we actually have. Not because it's perfect, or without its contradictions... but because it's real. Emotional. Collective. It's something that people from all walks of life actively choose to care about together. It doesn't have to be explained or marketed or given a brand voice. It just accumulates, season after season, until it's an integral part of a place's collective identity.

That kind of slow, voluntary investment in something larger than yourself is not a design deliverable. It's a design aspiration. And it's increasingly rare. So much of contemporary life (and contemporary retail, for that matter) is optimized for the individual. Personalized recommendations. Frictionless checkout. Curated feeds. All of it designed to make the experience more efficient, more targeted, more yours.

There's nothing inherently wrong with any of that. But somewhere in that optimization, certain things get lost. The accidental encounter. The shared moment with a stranger. The experience that wasn't tailored to you specifically but moved you anyway, because it moved everyone around you at the same time. The experiences that, over time, become the glue that binds people together.

That's what the best designed spaces still know how to do. And it's something worth protecting.

Which brings me to what's coming up next for the Heartland Chapter. In a couple short weeks, we'll be gathering in St. Louis to walk The Rawlings Experience together. It's the kind of place that earns the word experience honestly... designed not just to display a brand's history, but to put you inside it. To make you feel something. To connect you, through objects and stories and space, to the game itself and to everyone who's ever loved it.

In that sense, it's a little like sport itself: it doesn't ask you to be an expert or a superfan. It just asks you to show up, pay attention, and let the place do what good design does: draw you into something shared.

That's what we'll be doing together. Stepping away from our screens, being in a place, and experiencing firsthand what it looks and feels like when design sets out not to sell something, but to build something. A moment. A memory. A small, temporary community of people who were all in the same room at the same time and felt the same thing.

In a time when so much feels fragmented, when community is something we talk about more than we actually inhabit, that still matters. Maybe more than ever.

As people. And as designers.

I'm looking forward to sharing it with you.

Play on,

Michael Trenary, RDI

Heartland Chapter President