How a giant ball of stickers helped a metro Atlanta family cope with pandemic, cancer (with video)

The 10-year-old’s announcement came out of the blue. Or so it seemed.

“I want to make the world’s largest sticker ball,” Sofie Moricle told her parents on a spring day in 2018.

For those of you who don’t know, a sticker ball is just what it sounds like — a ball made of stickers.

The world’s largest sticker ball is also what it sounds like — a whole lot of work.

Initially, the girl’s father, Wade Moricle, laughed. But, as it so happened, Sofie had been to her elementary school’s book fair earlier that day. And she had picked up a glossy, hard-covered copy of “Guinness World Records.” And in it, there was a photograph of a Colorado man, posing next to a 231-pound giant ball made from thousands of stickers.

Sofie pointed to the image and declared to her parents: “We can break this record.”

Credit: Wade Moricle

Credit: Wade Moricle

Now, four-plus years later, the Moricles have what might be a record-breaking sticker ball in their garage.

The weeks and months of gathering stickers — Georgia voter, Eracism, Wild Heaven Beer, Agnes Scott, DoorDash, GrubHub and many, many more — then forming them into a sphere might be rewarded finally with a certificate, bragging rights and a tad of notoriety.

But the project took on more meaning for the family than all of that.

The pursuit carried them through the pandemic and a cancer diagnosis. As the ball grew from the size of a golf ball to a beach ball, their quest pulled in not just curious neighbors, who come bearing stickers, but the wider Avondale Estates community.

Credit: Wade Moricle

Any day now, the Moricles and their cohorts expect to hear if the unwieldy, 624.6 pound ball, as so weighed at an Avondale Estates Board of Commissioners meeting, will pass Guinness World Record muster.

But first things first. Here’s what they were up against. That 231-pound ball was the original record holder, a mark set in 2016, according to testimony given to the commissioners. But the record was broken again in 2020, with a 308-pound ball, in Vermont.

Both those balls were formed by sticker companies. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But the Moricles didn’t have a built-in supply of stickers. They had to scrounge for theirs while maintaining busy schedules.

That meant the Moricles’ sticker ball got a slow start. It began with Sofie wadding up heart stickers from a Sunday school class. Dad and daughter added stickers from every source they could think of – like the Dole stickers on bananas, the sticky prescription labels and unused sticky address return labels. They bought stickers at the Dollar Store.

They took the ball to family gatherings. But, once the pandemic hit, it was harder to go places to collect stickers.

And then, a major breakthrough. Moricle approached a local sign business Signarama. He asked if he and his daughter could have the leftover sticky adhesives from decals and signs.

Credit: Wade Moricle

Company officials were dumbstruck. Can you have them? Not only could the Moricles have the refuse, they would be doing the company a favor, they were told. That sticky leftovers are tricky to recycle and using them for the ball would, at the very least, keep them out of the trash.

The rules for building the biggest sticker ball are quite simple. It must be circular in shape (doesn’t have to be perfectly round but no eggplant-shaped balls) and the judging of the ball is based on its weight — not number of stickers. You can’t use tape. (That’s another category – largest tape ball).

But like many things in life, the challenge of building the biggest sticker ball was not as simple as it seemed. First, every sticker on the ball must be recorded. So the process requires precise bookkeeping. The Moricles also cut huge sheets of stickers into smaller stickers, and they separated them up based on colors.

Credit: Courtesy of Wade Moricle

They kept a basket of “special stickers,” which included those from local breweries, the Atlanta Braves, cute animals and such.

But, of course, the unanticipated happened. It turns out, you can’t keep a sticker ball in one position for too long. The ball would develop flat spots from the hardwood floor. So Moricle and a friend made a rolling cart with planks of wood and tennis balls to be able to lift the sticker ball and rotate it.

ExplorePhotos: Watch the sticker ball grow over four years

Then, on Jan. 21, 2021, Wade Moricle was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer. Months of chemotherapy was followed by radiation and surgery. While the family had gotten used to the idea of sheltering at home together during the pandemic, now they really needed to stay there. They couldn’t risk contracting the coronavirus — or any other virus — and passing it along to Wade.

And that’s when the sticker ball took on a new meaning and picked up speed.

Credit: ArLuther Lee

While Wade Moricle takes pride in being a generally upbeat person, the treatments left him weak and with brain fog. The sticker ball came in handy.

“I would go whole weeks where I just could not function intellectually at the level that I was used to. But I still had enough energy that I didn’t want to be sitting on the couch, turning into a vegetable. So the sticker ball gave me both an outlet and an excuse to do something that was active, but also to kind of avoid maybe coming to grips with the fact that mentally I was not the same,” he said.

He and Sofie worked on it together. As the seasons passed, they decorated the ball — a pumpkin for Halloween, a bright red ornament for Christmas, a pot of gold for St. Patrick’s Day and a Star Wars-inspired spaceship in between holidays.

Dad and daughter — and sometimes mom, Julie — often attached stickers to the ball while screening movies in the background.

Credit: Courtesy of Wade Moricle

“The sticker ball, for him, was really therapeutic in a way because, like, he couldn’t really go anywhere with cancer and the only thing he really had was just TV or the sticker,” Sofie said. “He just, like, loved putting stickers on it. And it was something fun we could do together.”

When friends and neighbors in Avondale Estates came to check in on the family, dropping off casseroles and soups, they also brought a sticker or two.

Wade completed his treatment in March. He has since been declared cancer free but still has to undergo regular check-ups.

Credit: Courtesy of Wade Moricle

For records purposes, he and Sofie finished the ball in September. The final tally was 202,510 stickers.

On a recent afternoon, Sofie, now 14, remarked how things had changed since they started the project.

“I’m still into it, “ she said, “but going into high school ... I don’t want to necessarily be known as the girl with a big ball of stickers in the living room, you know?”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, she added.