Dave Birkett

Detroit Free Press

When the Minnesota Vikings and New England Patriots pulled off a stunner of a trade late in the first round of the 2013 NFL draft, no one was more surprised than Brent Kisha.

Kisha, an account executive with Stahls’ in Sterling Heights, is part of a three-member team that a year earlier became one of the central behind-the-scenes figures in the well-oiled production that is the NFL draft, which this year begins Thursday night in Chicago.

The group, by virtue of its longstanding relationship with Nike, is responsible for decorating the No. 1 jersey that every prospect in attendance receives when he walks across the stage to meet NFL commissioner Roger Goodell immediately after he is drafted.

Kisha and his group — Bethany and Jonathan Stange were with him at the time — use a heat transfer press machine warmed up to 350 degrees to dwell a prospect’s nameplate on the back of his new team’s jersey.

The process takes about 10 seconds once the jersey is pre-loaded, and in 2013 Kisha had four jerseys per team hanging on a rolling rack inside his small workroom at Radio City Music Hall.

The Vikings selected defensive tackle Sharrif Floyd with the 23rd pick in the draft that night, and Kisha and his group knocked out two jerseys with Floyd’s name on the back — one for Floyd to keep and a second to be cut up and distributed in trading cards.

With the 25th pick, a choice the Vikings acquired a few weeks before the draft in a trade for Percy Harvin, Minnesota took cornerback Xavier Rhodes, and Kisha and his crew once again pressed out two jerseys.

Not every first-round pick attends the draft, so some team’s jerseys go unused, but when the Vikings traded up for the 29th pick and word spread that they were taking wide receiver Cordarrelle Patterson, both Kisha’s people and the NFL went into a panic.

With no more Vikings jerseys in the back room, Kisha recalls that an NFL employee went scrambling around Radio City Music Hall and found a No. 1 Vikings jersey hanging on a mannequin.

The uniform was rushed downstairs, and with a tribute to those killed or wounded in the Boston Marathon bombing playing at the time, the Stahls’ group had just enough time to get Patterson his keepsake.

“The Boston Marathon tribute bought us enough time for them to scramble up to the mannequin inside of Radio City Music Hall, bring it back into our room and we decorated it and it made it out to the stage,” Kisha said. “It was (frantic). We didn’t know what we were going to do. We weren’t sure if it had a name on it or not. If it comes back and has a name on it, what are we going to do? How are we going to cover up a name that could have been on it?”

Thankfully, after handling the jersey decorating for the past four drafts — since Nike won the NFL contract — moments like that have been rare.

And when Kisha and his new team of Lisa Leone and Cathi Christopher settle into their 100 square feet of working space inside the Auditorium Theatre at Roosevelt University in Chicago for the first round of the draft this Thursday, they’ll be ready for almost every scenario.

Already, Stahls’ has pre-cut the names of all 25 prospects attending the draft in the font and color of all 32 NFL teams.

Cal quarterback Jared Goff is expected to go first overall to the Los Angeles Rams, but if he somehow ended up with the Detroit Lions, his nameplate would match his new Honolulu blue uniform.

Representatives from the NFL and Nike join the Stahls’ workroom, which is adjacent to Goodell’s during the draft, and the NFL employee has a headset that receives a direct feed of every team’s pick.

Jerseys are preloaded (and quickly changed out in the case of trades) onto two heatpresses run by Kisha and Christopher — they began using two machines last year, when they feared there could be hiccups after a late change to use gold lettering (for the 50th anniversary of the Super Bowl) for prospects’ names — and Leone oversees a file with the nameplates separated by team.

When the pick is in, the name goes on and the heatpress goes down, and 10 seconds or so later it’s ready to be handed to Goodell.

“Kind of seems it should be more sexy than that, right?” joked Stahls’ CEO Chris Lawson. “I mean, a monkey can do it.”

After four years of perfecting an incredibly precise operation with little room for error, the process will expand this year.

Carl Agosta, an account rep who works closely with sports venues and arenas, will oversee Stahls’ Draft Town setup in Grant Park for the second straight year, where fans can get T-shirts decorated with their names and favorite team’s logo.

An estimated 200,000 fans visited Draft Town last year, the draft’s first year in Chicago.

And Kisha’s team will decorate more than the standard two jerseys this year as the NFL is expected to expand the process to include several not-yet-announced fan giveaways.

“It’s just a fun experience,” Kisha said. “You see the fans are all really excited ’cause they always get them involved with it. Like last year, they brought the fan up into our room who got to take the jersey out to the commissioner. It’s just great. Every year there always seems to be something.”

Contact Dave Birkett: dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett. Download our Lions Xtra app for free on Apple and Android!

NFL draft

When: Thursday-Saturday.

Where: Auditorium Theatre, Chicago.

TV: ESPN, NFL Network.

Schedule: Round 1, 8 p.m. Thursday; Rounds 2-3, 7 p.m. Friday; Rounds 4-7, noon .

Lions’ first pick: No. 16 overall.

Here's some data on how badly the Detroit Lions have drafted