DARLINGTON, S.C. – Colby Howard’s Tricon No. 1 truck will have a unique look and a local connection come Friday at the Buckle Up South Carolina 200.
And it was all made possible by an unlikely source – baseball cards.
Or more specifically, sports cards and the card-collecting industry.
Howard’s main sponsor for the Craftsman Truck Series race at Darlington is Coastal Sports Cards (https://coastalsportscards.com/), a sports card hobby shop that has two locations in the Palmetto State (Myrtle Beach & Simpsonville).
The combo of NASCAR and card collecting came together in large part through Steven Sellers, the Chesterfield High School baseball coach who has run his own online sports card business – Ohana Sports Cards (https://www.facebook.com/Carolina1sports/) – for the past seven years.
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“I picked up with NASCAR at the beginning of last year,” Sellers said. “One of the guys who buys cards from me (Jon Stacy) works with NASCAR. I’d never really gotten into the sport, but went to the Mother’s Day race last spring in Darlington in the pits and had a blast.”
Sellers wound up going to the Cook Out Southern 500 as well along with other races at Bristol, Charlotte and the Daytona 500, incorporating his passion for sports cards with his new love of NASCAR.
“Breaking” refers to opening a box or multiple boxes of cards then distributing them to customers. Sellers and a few of his partners in the card business have done live breakings at some of the race tracks, and a special one is planned for the infield at Darlington with Howard as the main guest.
“We’re going to be opening a National Treasures Racing set, so we’ll have a chance to open one of the cards that Colby Howard actually signed for Panini to put into the product,” Sellers said.
It will mark a full-circle moment for Sellers, who never could have guessed how a small hobby of selling cards online from the spare bedroom in his house would grow.
“The way the algorithm works on Facebook and social media, it was really by accident how it grew,” he said. “(My family and I) were sitting at Disney World eating at the Polynesian Resort and I was trying to find a name for my card business because it was starting to jump.
“We were eating a restaurant called ‘Ohana’ and ohana obviously means ‘family.’ We wanted to create a family atmosphere, and for a dad to be able to sit down with any age kid and watch our streams and enjoy. So that’s what we named it.”
When talking about the business online, the hashtag #ohana was used across all platforms, Sellers said, and it wound up popping up on a lot of accounts in Hawaii, where the word originated.
“Our first customers were actually in Hawaii, and it slowly crept across the U.S. from the West Coast all the way to East Coast,” Sellers said. “Right now, we ship to 48 out of 50 states, but it took three or four years to get customers on the East Coast.”
The business, which started in late 2016, grew along with the sports card industry, which saw a rise during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and has become even more popular since.
“The card shops happened slowly after gaining so much interest online, we just eventually branched out to brick and mortar shops,” Sellers said.
He partnered with Kevin Rape and Brian Barnett in Myrtle Beach and Brody and Joe Vaughn in Simpsonville for the stores. Joe Vaughn actually won the Betty Jane France Humanitarian Award in 2019, and is involved with NASCAR as well.
So the idea of sponsoring one of the trucks at the local track in Darlington soon started to take hold.
“The more I got into NASCAR, the more I wanted to sponsor a truck,” Sellers said. “We wanted it to be at Darlington because that’s kind of near all of us. It was something we all enjoyed and decided to come together and do it.”
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Howard, who is from Simpsonville, was the obvious choice for the driver to reach out to.
“Joe knows his family very well and that was the connection there,” Sellers said. “Joe brought the idea up and I thought it was amazing. We just kind of rolled with it from there.
“It’s been a very surreal process and very exciting to see.”