The obvious solution for tons of NCAA bubble laundry? Put a Delco guy in charge. | Mike Jensen

The city of Indianapolis is used to holding big-time sporting events. The Final Four makes regular stops there. This idea, however, of holding the entire NCAA men’s tournament in the state, with the vast majority of games in the city … brand new, obviously. Creating a pandemic bubble, on the fly.

As the idea moved toward reality, Steve Sanner’s offer to the head of the Indiana Sports Corporation was simple: “I talked to my wife — we’ll do whatever you need done, we’ll scrub toilets.”

Nope, not that.

“How do you feel about cleaning underwear?”

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Putting Sanner in charge of cleaning all game uniforms and practice gear, maybe it was a fit, since problem-solving on logistics isn’t foreign to Sanner. The Delaware County-born and raised Marple Newtown High and Penn State graduate, who now owns 50 Jiffy Lubes in Indiana, could handle some crazy logistics. He’s on the board of the Sports Corp.

“We have 6,000 volunteers who are ready to jump in and help for every event,” Sanner said. “We have more volunteers than employees. … It’s a special place. People get along and want to put on a good show. I came out, I was a smart [aleck] from Philly, but this place is amazing.”

Originally, the laundry plan was to use trucks from the Army, with reservists helping out. Then they realized if there was a natural disaster somewhere, that would take precedence and the laundry trucks would have to leave and the teams would be playing in dirty jerseys. Somebody from the NCAA called Lowe’s, which also has laundry trucks. A deal was struck for two trucks, with eight washers and dryers in each.

“As of last night, we’d done 11 tons of laundry,” Sanner said Tuesday afternoon.

Teams were told to bring enough personal clothes for a week, and then arrangements were made with five local laundries to clean those clothes for any surviving Sweet 16 teams.

The trucks inside the bubble, that’s just for uniforms and practice gear. Multiply that stuff by 68 original teams, you get to 11 tons.

One thing Sanner has noticed: the difference in budgets from school to school, how some teams come in with three or four sets of gorgeous embroidered practice gear. “A lot of the schools come in with a mesh bag with one set of gear.”

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Sometimes the laundry folks have to go on a fast break. Like the day early on when someone from Norfolk State came in. First practice in an hour, any way we can get this done?

Sanner did say he was a smart [aleck] from Philly.

“I actually said, Norfolking way,’' Sanner said.

They made it happen. Rush job for a team that would go on to beat Appalachian State in a play-in game, then fall to mighty Gonzaga.

“Ten minutes before practice, they were getting dressed on the court,’' Sanner said of Norfolk State.

The busiest days were early this week, he said, collecting the personal laundry and dry cleaning for all 34 members of each Sweet 16 team’s entourage in the bubble. A couple of dry cleaners originally had said they’d take all the business, Sanner said, but a couple got back to him and said they were glad it had been divided up.

Lost anything?

“Three single socks,’' Sanner said. “We’ve had a couple of things misplaced. We found them pretty quickly.”

The laundry committee, Sanner said, was put together word of mouth.

“It had to be people we knew or people we knew who knew people,’' Sanner said. “The last thing that could happen was damaging or losing a game uniform. You bring in someone just from a volunteer list, they think it’s cool to get a Robinson-Earl game-worn jersey.”

Jeremiah Robinson-Earl is a Villanova star. Sanner isn’t wrong. Such a jersey would fetch a fair price.

Husband-and-wife teams are common on the laundry committee.

“The husbands, we’ll do a couple of loads and need a break,’' Sanner said. “The women rock and roll. Not to be sexist, but the women are just better than us.”

In fact, the hours for all of them have been fairly insane, regularly 7 a.m. until after midnight most days. Sanner said he took one night off and made the mistake of turning the TV on, watching Abilene Christian do its thing in the first round. He couldn’t turn it off. There went his one possible eight-hour night of sleep.

» READ MORE: A season without hoops at the Palestra

How Sanner ended up owning a bunch of franchises in the Midwest has its roots as a Philly story. He’d originally gotten in the gelato business after Penn State.

“I went to South Florida and sold ice cream,’' Sanner said.

But his friend’s dad, who owned the drug store across from Philadelphia’s old Connie Mack Stadium, had sold that and gotten in early on owning McDonald’s franchises.

“Everyone thought he was nuts,” Sanner said.

When a couple of partners were intrigued about this new oil-change franchise business that Sanner had never heard of, he was lured in, although all the local franchises were spoken for. He could head to the Midwest. There were no pins on the map for Indiana, and he was quite sure they had cars out there.

He never looked back, and has become a civic fixture in Indiana, including being in charge of running the Big Ten championship football game.

So this laundry offer didn’t come out of left field. Sanner hasn’t lost touch with home, though.

“I was just talking to Phil Martelli,” Sanner said of the former St. Joseph’s coach, now a Michigan assistant. “He was walking by. We were talking cheesesteaks.”

Gotten slower with only 16 teams left?

“It’s gotten almost boring,” Sanner said.

There are superstars away from the court. Sanner pointed to Craig Yust, senior director of events for the Sports Corp., the one paid employee involved in the laundry operation, in addition to overseeing all the courts. Sanner said Yust did laundry for 36 hours straight on Tuesday and Wednesday.

“He is a beast!!!” Sanner texted with a photo he sent. “Spent time in minor league baseball, where 18-hour days are normal.”

They see crazy stuff, not all related to laundry. Like the starter for … actually no name of the school. (It’s a Southeastern Conference school, so that doesn’t really narrow it down.) … Anyway, the player got to the game, wore a warmup for warmups, realized he’d left his game jersey back at the team room in the hotel. A 40-minute fire drill ensued. Someone helping out raced back to the team room, found the jersey, started over to one arena, where he’d been told this team was. A woman was waiting for it, as it got thrown out a car window.

“She looks at the jersey, ‘Wrong game,’ " Sanner said, meaning, the team was playing a few blocks away.

“She finds a motorcycle cop,” Sanner said. He took off with the jersey to the right spot, siren blaring.

“They get the jersey to the kid as they’re walking toward the court to start the game,” Sanner said.

“Crazy stuff is happening every day,” Sanner added. “Our people are so amazing. They are Type A, detail oriented. These events, there is a manual for everything. But this thing, we told them, things are going to go wrong. You’re used to things going perfectly. Understand, we haven’t thought of everything. We can’t think of everything. Everyone has learned to adjust and adapt.”

He can’t complain, even though as a board member, he probably could have gone for a task a little closer to the courts. He hasn’t seen a game live yet.

“Most of the board members like the glamorous jobs, like escorting Jay Wright around,” said Sanner, who played basketball at Marple Newtown, and used to sneak into the gym at Villanova for pickup games. “We’ll just do whatever you need.”

How did we hear about Sanner and this laundry detail? His 88-year-old mother, who lives with his father at the Riddle Village assisted-living facility in Media, emailed about it.

“This laundry thing is really a big deal, and pretty funny!” Allegra Sanner noted in her email.

Thanks for the tip, Mom.

Their slogan in the laundry department?

“We only say yes,” Steve Sanner said. “Or we say, no sweat.”