A Minnesota bride created a custom wedding ring for her groom using actual flooring from the Timberwolves' Target Center home court, combining his lifelong passion for basketball with their marriage through a unique maple and gold band inlaid with team blue.
- Custom ring material: Real maple flooring from the Minnesota Timberwolves' Target Center court, replaced during renovations
- Design features: Maple wood layered with epoxy, gold accents, and a blue inlay from directly below the basketball hoop
- Creator: Rustic & Main, a custom ring maker known for crafting bands from decommissioned naval ships and whiskey barrels
- How she got the court wood: Allie reached out via LinkedIn to the Timberwolves VP of Fan Experience, who connected her with Target Center staff
- Wedding date: The couple celebrated their Timberwolves-themed wedding on May 17, 2025
Modern day brides and grooms are pushing the limits of what a wedding can entail: skydiving nuptials, choreographed wedding party dances, and, now, rings crafted from their favorite NBA team’s home court.
Allie Nelson (neé Lawler) had the idea to make a piece of the Minnesota Timberwolves’ 2022–2023 home court into her groom’s wedding ring after seeing an ad from custom ring maker Rustic & Main. Her beau, Josh Nelson, had yet to pop the question, but as a professional solutions engineer, Allie is always thinking one step ahead. “I was thinking about this way far in advance,” she says. “But we both knew pretty early on in our relationship that this is it.”
Rustic & Main had caught Allie’s attention with their wood rings made from decommissioned naval ships and whiskey barrels. She wondered if the company could create a wedding band out of a wood source closer to Josh’s heart: the floorboards of the Target Center’s Minnesota Timberwolves court. “The main connection that I made between him and a wood material was a basketball court. He’s been involved with basketball his whole life,” Allie says. Rustic & Main were happy to take on the project.
Allie Nelson got in touch with the Minnesota Timberwolves Vice President of Fan Experience Jeff Munneke, and procured a piece of the court for her groom's ring.
The next step was to procure a piece of the floor. After putting out a call for help to her LinkedIn network—a social platform Josh isn’t on—Allie got the attention of Minnesota Timberwolves Vice President of Fan Experience Jeff Munneke. “He connected me with the Target Center, then I just drove to the loading dock and they pulled out a hunk of flooring that was being replaced,” she says. “They gave me a board that was 4 or 5 feet long.” Once her neighbor cut the board into more mailable pieces, Allie shipped the maple to North Carolina, where Rustic & Main crafted it into Josh’s ring.
By this time, Josh had proposed to Allie, and they set their wedding date for May 17, 2025. Luckily, Allie had enough time to collaborate with Rustic & Main on the ring, as they went back and forth about whether or not a blue painted piece could be incorporated.
“We shave the wood into thinner strips, layer them onto each other or into the inlay before using an epoxy to seal the ring,” explains Lydia Umberger, customer experience manager at Rustic & Main. They weren’t certain that the original blue painted piece would submit to this process.
In the end, Allie received a handsome maple and gold wedding ring with a layer of Timberwolves-blue, sourced from right below the hoop, for her betrothed. “It’s really irreplaceable,” she says. On the day of their Timberwolves-themed wedding, she surprised Josh with the custom ring and snuck a meaningful promise into her vows “to always learn the T-wolves’ roster every year!”
Nelson surprised her future husband, Josh, with the irreplaceable ring on the morning of their wedding.
Josh's ring features maple, gold and a layer of Timberwolves-blue, sourced from right below the hoop in the Target Center.
