HOUSTON-AREA MEDICAL centers were on lockdown when Wiley Rogers arrived.
Even so, in each building, security guards gladly allowed him in. Nurses even cheered.
Rogers, a sophomore on the Stanford sailing team, was delivering face shields to help protect staff while treating patients suffering from the COVID-19 virus. The shields were his idea and his project for his father's business, a printing company that found a way to stay afloat and keep itself vital.
During these visits, Rogers got a frontline view of what medical personnel were up against and left with a deepened perspective and a greater understanding.
"Seeing people struggle is something unbearable to watch," he said.
That night, Rogers returned to the family home to Kemah, Texas, stunned at how stressed the frontline workers were and how grateful they were for what he was doing.
"I think he realized his impact was far beyond sales and profits to the family business," wrote his father, Yandell Rogers, in an e-mail. "He was making a difference."
Stanford sailing has been making a difference at home too. The team's fleet of vans transports donations of personal protective equipment from drives hosted by Stanford Medicine and School of Engineering students to hospitals and clinics.
This should be the middle of Stanford's season for Wiley. Instead, he's helped keep a company in business, saved dozens of jobs, and supplied thousands with potentially life-saving protection. These achievements rival anything he's accomplished on the water, and they are many.
Skipper Wiley Rogers and crew Taylor Kirkpatrick.
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WHEN STANFORD HALTED in-person classes March 6, Rogers was in Maryland during a dizzying stretch of racing. He and Stanford teammates Jack Parkin, Jacob Rosenberg, and Victoria Thompson won silver at the Youth Match Racing World Championships – the highest U.S. finish ever in the under-23 event – in Auckland, New Zealand on March 1. The same quartet gave Stanford its first collegiate match race national championship last fall.
Here on the St. Mary's River, a brackish tidal tributary of the Potomac, Rogers helped Stanford earn another honor, winning the St. Mary's Team Race, the nation's most prestigious team regatta so far in the young season.
These results signaled a special spring on the horizon for the Cardinal. Rogers and Parkin were the backbone of this optimism, with success together going back to their 2016 youth world championship in the 420 class.
There were murmurs the season would be halted in response to the pandemic and by the close of the weekend it was official. Stanford sailed simultaneously at three East Coast regattas and most sailors chose to go directly home rather than to Stanford, believing they would return to campus in a few weeks.
Rogers was among the few to return to Stanford, completing the winter quarter online in his room at the Kappa Sigma fraternity house. Afterward, he packed as much as he could transport – four or five suitcases and bags – and came home.
When Wiley arrived in Kemah, on Galveston Bay, southeast of Houston, Rogers found Signature Aspen, a large commercial printing company, in crisis.
Signature Aspen enjoyed the biggest January and February in company history and anticipated records for March and April. But within days, Signature Aspen lost 80 percent of its business as upcoming events were canceled one by one.
"I've worked there a fair amount, but the way things were, as stressful as it was, I kind of had to beg my way to get into the office," Wiley said. "It wasn't a no-brainer for them to say, 'Sure, come up and mingle with everybody and get within close quarters.'
"I went to the drawing board and said, 'What can we do?' Then, I threw ideas around."
Not all of them, he admitted, were great. But after taking a visual inventory of materials at hand, especially cutting instruments that could slice through a variety of substances, he zeroed in on producing reusable personal protective equipment with washable face shields, and gave a pitch.
With authority over the project, Wiley had to determine if it could be done. The shields would be made of a form of polyester and other plastics, but finding suppliers that still clear plastics under 20 millimeters thick in stock was frustrating and time-consuming.
Wiley called perhaps 50 plastic distributors before he was able to pin one down. There still were production costs to consider, plotting an assembly line, creating samples and a prototype, and looking for ways to keep costs down while retaining quality.
Finally, it had to be something that would sell, and the timing had to be right.
"My dad, who runs the company, was a big fan of the idea, but if it took any longer than it did, it would never have been possible," Wiley said.
Idea to production took only six days -- "Six long days," Rogers added.
"Luckily, through a lot of contacts we had at hospitals and clinics, this was a product that many medical specialists believed would be helpful to the general public and themselves," Rogers said.
It wasn't necessarily designed to be a moneymaker. The first order was to mitigate losses and keep most of the base workforce employed.
"Needless to say, things looked bleak," wrote Yandell Rogers. "Wiley generated the idea and the team surrounded him in getting prototype completed. He worked with production and sales and created an online platform to market this through.
"Due to Wiley's efforts, we have been able to keep over 90 percent of our employee base (55 employees in all) working during these uncertain times."
In the past 2 ½ weeks, Signature Aspen distributed more than 30,000 face shields, including some at a Houston Astros donation drive that caught the attention of Houston mayor Sylvester Turner, who made arrangements to secure some for his office and staff.
"Obviously, we were super interested in keeping our business community at Signature Aspen together, and reducing layoffs where we could," Wiley said. "Aside from that, all money and materials aside, there's a certain degree of, You've got to be human first."
National collegiate match race champions (from left): Wiley Rogers, Victoria Thompson, Jacob Rosenberg, Jack Parkin. Photo by John P. Lozano/ISIphotos.com.
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THAT SAME MENTALITY applies at Stanford.
When Stanford graduate engineering student Yukinobu Tanimoto was searching for ways to transport donations from a drive at Stanford Shopping Center to medical centers and clinics, he contacted his academic advisor Jeffrey Koseff, the faculty athletics representative. That began a chain through associate athletics director Jamie Breslin to boathouse manager Jason Hilton to sailing coach Brian Swingly to use the team's fleet of vans.
Because the drivers would be students and not professionals, they needed vehicles that were easy to drive and park. The sailing vans were larger than most other team vans, making them perfect for the distributions.
In two weeks, Tanimoto said that the vans have delivered 7,000 N95 masks, 10,000 surgical masks, 60,000 gloves, and 500 surgical gowns to more than 15 clinics and more than 10 hospitals over the past two weeks. The drives have grown to three locations, including ones in Los Altos and Santa Clara.
"The vans are an essential part of our operation now," Tanimoto wrote in an e-mail. "We can't imagine running things without them."
In Texas, Rogers has been busy. Besides, the face shields and school work, he and teammate Rosenberg are creating a startup that provides replacement custom lenses for sunglasses.
Rogers has access to sailing with an international 420 dinghy and a foil at their home with a private pier and open water, and sailing is not discouraged despite shelter in place orders. However, Rogers has not taken full advantage so far.
There hasn't been much time for fishing either. Rogers is a gifted sportfisherman and for three years held an age-group world record for an alligator gar – an ancient species that can breathe in air and water -- that eventually wandered back into the bay after weighing.
As a sailor, Rogers is gifted in his understanding of the sport. His mind and body are quick, he's skilled in tactics and sail trimming. Though he's outstanding at match racing, "double-handed fleet racing is where my heart lies," he said.
"He's talented and dedicated to the sport," Swingly said. "He had a really good freshman year, but this year, with the team racing discipline we do in the spring, he really started to shine."
Since the inception of the face shield project, Signature Aspen has had zero layoffs and brought some employees back who had been let go.
Rogers, who plans to major in management science and engineering with a focus on finance and decision analysis, said he's thankful for the opportunity to take on a project and produce a product, especially in times like these.
"I'll take this into the future as a huge learning lesson," he said.
"Is he a better fisherman or sailor?" Yandell Rogers wrote. "I don't know how to rank that. He has great passion for all things on the water. But, for me, his time at Stanford has opened his mind to and created a spirit of possibilities and a sensitivity to being a great steward to people and the community at large.
"Through his efforts, he has positively impacted so many lives and families, when it is hard for them to see a stable future."
At Stanford, Swingly tries to keep a sense of team unity with weekly video conferencing meetings.
"Wiley missed a team meeting because … it's funny because he was so apologetic … but it was because he was having a meeting with the mayor of Houston," Swingly said.
"I said, 'Wiley, that's fine. You're doing bigger and better things right now. This is bigger than sailing, you know?"
Jack Parkin, Wiley Rogers, and Brian Swingly. Photo by John Todd/ISIphotos.com.