By Susan Monaghan Gillette News Record via Wyoming News Exchange
GILLETTE- Beckett Ganske’s football card of former running back David Johnson is one of only 49 cards ever produced and includes a piece of Johnson’s Arizona Cardinals jersey.
In its protective plastic sleeve, the card — 2.5 by 3.5 inches — is the perfect weight. The jersey patch shows most of the cardinal’s eye and beak, and when held at a certain angle, an iridescent stripe lights up Johnson’s face.
Beckett, 13, found it a few weeks ago in a park near his house. Of course, it was hidden there for him to find, but it’s still a better story than buying it at Walmart.
“It was fun hunting for them, the challenge,” Beckett said. “I like hunting and fishing and stuff.”
A few weeks ago, 22-year-old Brennan Brinda and his 20-year-old girlfriend Lena Wilson hid two specially made decks of cards for Beckett and his 9-year-old brother Camden during a scavenger hunt throughout the park.
This was the second scavenger hunt that Brinda had organized that day.
The first one, organized that morning in downtown Gillette, was announced on Facebook so anyone could join in. Brinda said the hunt in downtown Gillette, while a little more involved, is the first of many he plans to organize for the children in the area.
Brinda’s sports card collection numbers approximately 20,000 cards. He can easily select the right cards for the occasion from the thousands stored in his apartment in “boxes and boxes and smaller boxes stacked on top of larger boxes,” as Wilson put it. Most of these were recently moved to his father’s storage unit after his dog knocked over a sizable stack in the living room.
In the Facebook post, Brinda asked anyone who found one of the six packs of cards to post a picture. That part didn’t really work out, and it wasn’t for a lack of enthusiasm from the participants. That morning, Beckett and Camden had begged their mother, Nikki Ganske, to get them into town as soon as possible.
“They were really excited about going into town and were like, ‘Drive, Mommy, drive,'” Nikki said. “Anything we can do to get them outside and do something is great.”
After a short time, Nikki realized that all the cards had been found, even though no one had posted a photo. Nikki said she contacted Brinda to tell him that all the cards were gone. To Brinda, it just didn’t seem right that two true sports card enthusiasts should go home empty-handed.
That evening, the hunt in Lakeland Hills Park lasted twenty minutes, and the catch was impressive.
Why sports cards?
Wilson said she doesn’t really understand the sports card thing, although she enjoys helping Brinda organize the scavenger hunts.
“I support this 100%. The faces of the little ones light up when they open a deck of cards,” Wilson said. “(But) I don’t understand the obsession with the cards and probably never will.”
A big part of the hobby is finding cards that honor a player with personal significance, Brinda said. He collects cards featuring Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen, who played college football for the University of Wyoming.
Collecting the valuable cards – cards with a jersey patch or a player’s autograph – is also attractive. If you buy a card collection from someone, as Brinda sometimes does through Facebook, there’s always the chance of finding a rare or valuable card in the haystack.
Brinda started the Facebook page for the scavenger hunts, Cards 4 Kids, after purchasing four large boxes of cards from a private seller. It proved too time-consuming to go through every single card in each box, and his attempt to resell them online was unsuccessful.
“I thought, ‘Maybe I can give back to the community by making little packages out of them and hiding them,'” Brinda said. “I wanted it to be something that families could enjoy.”
He tries to make sure that the people who join the currently private group actually have children. It’s a problem that has plagued the world of sports card collecting in recent years: Adult collectible card enthusiasts sometimes buy cards only to resell them for a premium, or put them in large “surprise” packages.
By narrowing the activity down so that children in particular can have fun searching for cards, the monetary value of the cards becomes irrelevant. Ideally, the love of the cards themselves remains. But even if the incentive to win is removed from the equation, card hunting can quickly become addictive.
“It was more of an addiction than anything else,” Brinda said. “It’s almost like gambling.”
Brinda himself was addicted to sports cards from a young age. He remembers his grandmother buying him his first pack at Shopko in Lander when he was 5 or 6. When asked what made his first encounter with sports cards so special, he finds it hard to say.
“I think it was probably just because she had a common interest in something,” Brinda said.
Lately, Brinda has enjoyed opening packets of cards with his own children. Brinda and Wilson’s two daughters, 3-year-old Lily Brinda and 4-year-old Rose Brinda, seem interested, he said.
“Every time we go to the store, they ask if we can buy a box of cards,” Brinda said. “They like to flip through them.”
Looking at Brinda’s story, Lily and Rose could have their own collections in a few years. How they get rid of them is another story.
