In 1991, Mark Wallrapp was living every 18-year-old boy’s dream. As a senior at Walpole High School in Massachusetts, his football team had put together a perfect season. After all the Gatorade was mopped up from the locker room floor and the final numbers were logged in the stat books, the Walpole Rebels had finished out the season as state champions and the number-one ranked team in New England.

Throughout the year, Mark chronicled his team’s victories with articles he had clipped from the local newspaper. Eventually those stories – and other memorabilia – went into a hefty 70-page scrapbook commemorating his invincible team. And that’s where his memories lived for nearly 20 years … until last November when he decided to give them a bigger purpose.

Mark knew creating copies of the album wasn’t something he wanted to do alone, so he Googled “scrapbooking,” which led him to a Zip code prompt to find the nearest Creative Memories Consultant in his area. And that brought him to our very own Jodi Eisner.

Mark told Jodi he wanted to create a digital photo book from his original album so he could give a copy to each player and coach of the 1991 team. (Oh, and by the way, he needed them quickly … in time for his football team’s reunion just a few weeks later.) So the two met at a local coffee shop to hammer out the details and transfer the album into Jodi’s care.

“At first I thought it would be a pretty easy project,” recalls Jodi. “I figured I could just scan each page, zap out the white background, bring in one of our cool digital backgrounds and I’d be done.”

There was only one problem with that scenario. A lot of the newspaper articles in the original album weren’t in chronological order. So Jodi (being Jodi) decided to redo the entire album and put the articles in their proper order … even if that meant bringing in each article one at a time and starting from scratch.

She got to work cropping all of the scanned pages in Memory Manager. Then she brought all of those parts and pieces into Storybook Creator and organized them page-by-page based on a team schedule she found tucked in the back of the original album. She also added a number of new pages honoring the coaches and highlighting team players. Finally, she created cool digital embellishments using stickers Mark had of the team’s mascot and logo.

“Jodi is super diligent!” marvels Mark. “She took on this project like it was her own. I’d get an email from her at 2 or 3 in the morning asking me questions or telling me about a cool idea she had for a page. She turned my original scrapbook into the most amazing memory book I could have imagined – one that actually told a story. I couldn’t be more thrilled with the final coffee-table version of this 70-page book.”

Less than two weeks after their first meeting, Jodi fired off the order to the Creative Memories home office to be printed. And, not long after, Mark showed up at his reunion with 30 newly designed copies of his commemorative StoryBook.

On the Monday after the big event, Jodi received this special text from Mark: “The players and coaches were blown away by the memories book! Absolutely floored. Thank you, once again, for going the extra mile with all the DETAILS. You made my project yours, and I'll never forget that.”

We’re calling this one a win for Jodi’s team.