BALTIMORE — Lying down on his grandmother’s rug, Adam Clement takes out his sketchbook and draws a picture of a ballpark.

Not just any ballpark, but home of the imaginary Phoenix Sundevils. Everything is drawn to scale up to center field being marked 405 feet. He makes the home jerseys red and white pinstriped with yellow accents and white socks, and the away jerseys solid red with white pants and yellow socks. There’s also an alternate gray jersey with gray pants. These are drawn on the next page.

Not bad for a 7-year-old.

Now the sketchbook is about 30 years old, yellowing, and delicate. And Clement, Under Armour’s creative director of team sports, still has it. He keeps it in his office.

“This is literally what I do today,” he said. “I look back and it’s like holy crap. I like to think I was born to play professional baseball, but this is where I’m supposed to be.”

In nine years, Clement has climbed the creative ladder at Under Armour from apparel graphics to the top of design. He’s been involved in forming some of the most polarizing and talked about uniforms in college football. Remember the Maryland Pride Uniform back in 2011?

“That was a school that had a nice history in football but were no longer a conversation piece,” Clement said. “They had a new coach (Randy Edsall), a new administration, and wanted to put themselves back on the map. So in discussions, we had talked about doing something that had never been done before. We knew it would create buzz.”

The uniform in question was the Maryland checkered flag slapped on the helmets, jerseys and cleats. The Terrapins played Miami on a Monday night in primetime and the only thing anyone could talk about was the ensemble.

“It was like lightning in a bottle,” Clement said. “People either hated it or loved it. In a poll, more people actually hated it, but in the state of Maryland, the people who liked it vastly outnumbered the people who didn’t like it, and that was most important.

“We’re (three) years removed from that and you can’t not associate that flag with that university. And honestly that was our plan going into it. You can’t worry about negativity because you have a larger end goal in mind.”

Under Armour designs uniforms for a multitude of programs. Some have rich tradition and don’t like to mess with the jersey too much — like Notre Dame and Auburn — and some like to get wild and crazy once in awhile — like Maryland and Texas Tech.

Clement sees opportunities with both kinds of personalities. Each project is different.

When Under Armour signed Notre Dame in January 2014, Clement immediately started to research. Within a month, he and his team had read three or four books on the history and tradition of the school. He’s also been to South Bend five times and taken personal tours of the campus.

“We want to become synonymous with that school and the easiest way to do that is to learn everything about it,” Clement said.

This kind of TLC isn’t unique to Notre Dame. Clement takes visits to all campuses associated with UA. The goal is “exploratory research,” Clement says. He takes photos of everything from libraries to architecture to the stadiums. When he gets back to his Baltimore office, he and his team cover the walls in photos and begin looking for threads of connectivity and stories to tell through the uniform.

“It’s sensory overload,” he said.

One of the most talked about uniforms of this season were Maryland’s Star-Spangled uniforms they wore against West Virginia. It was inspired by the 200th anniversary of Francis Scott Key’s poem “Defence of Fort McHenry”, which provided the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” This was initially going to be a basketball uniform, until Clement discovered that the actual anniversary of the Battle of Baltimore fell on a football Saturday.

“What’s funny about this uniform is we actually started concepting on it three years ago,” he said. “We went and toured Fort McHenry and got tons of inspiration. I love old American war history and this was too good to pass up.”

Another program known for its uniforms is Texas Tech, especially when the team wears all black. This year the Red Raiders have gotten funky a couple of times, like when they broke out White Ombre uniforms against Oklahoma State, and Lone Star Pride uniforms that looked like Texas flags against Texas.

This creativity is due in part to working with coach Kliff Kingsbury, who has a creative license in his contract that allows him to help design all of the Red Raiders uniforms. Clement enjoys the partnership.

“He’s a super cool, super young, quintessential modern-day coach,” Clement said. “He understands the direct connection of, I can walk into a young man’s living room and say, ‘You can come to my university and you’re going to wear something different every single weekend.’ Kids like stuff. So he understands it.

“What’s neat about it is, he has it in his contract not so he can say, ‘Under Armour you need to do this,’ but so he can say ‘I want to make sure I’m giving my guys something fresh every single season.’”

Oregon is the godfather of uniforms. The Ducks have about 60 different combinations and thanks to Nike, are the leaders in uniform innovation. Clement has a book on Oregon in his office. It’s a thick vault with copies of old tickets, programs, historical information about the football team and is just a wealth of information.

Clement knows it back to front. (He also has vaults for every school Under Armour has signed.)

“It’s important to know what the competition does and understand where they’ve been and where they’re going,” he said in reference to not only Nike but adidas as well. “I think we all do that. We make them better and they make us better.

“If you strip the brand on our logos and put all of our people in one room and ask everyone their goal, their goals are exactly the same. It’s to make athletes better, it’s to come up with the next greatest innovation and evolution in a uniform and coolest design possible.

“We want to make sure we’re not falling behind them and they don’t want to fall behind us.”