Are you not entertained? Sea Bears’ hype guy Kosyuga is the man behind the light-up shades By: Grace Penner Posted: 5:00 PM CDT Wednesday, Jun. 17, 2026

He jumps through the crowd with light-up sunglasses, displaying the message “Go Sea Bears Go” while his suit reacts to the fans’ cheers and the team’s advances.

Anton Kosyuga — the man behind the shades — has been prancing around Winnipeg’s sports centres since 2022.

“Everything was a complete accident. [I] never expected to be in the sports industry in general,” Kosyuga said.

Growing up, Kosyuga was never an athlete himself, but always on the sidelines cheering on his friends, front and centre.

“I’ve always wanted to play sports but at the end of the day,” he said, “I’m a better entertainer.”

Kosyuga’s talents were scouted at a Winnipeg Blue Bombers game after he showed up on the Jumbotron wearing the first blueprint of his famous sunglasses.

“I brought my shades for the first time… I was just going crazy and wild,” he reminisced.

A random stranger — someone fans should now thank — told Kosyuga he should apply for the Winnipeg Jets to be a part of their promotional team. By his second game for the hometown hockey club, he was part of the group that unveiled the Dale Hawerchuk statue at True North Square.

“They hired a fan. I’ve always been a fan of all the sports teams in Winnipeg,” he said.

“I just remember standing there and that was the first time when I was like, ‘this is real. This is happening.’”

When the Winnipeg Sea Bears arrived a year later, Kosyuga jumped at the opportunity to entertain a new set of fans. This was where his creativity thrived — ergo the famous suit. Kosyuga asked the game day producer at the time if there was any guidelines for the uniform — he was told to “just have fun.”

“How do I make it as fun as possible for people that don’t necessarily just want to watch basketball?”

That’s precisely what he did.

“Everywhere I could put lights, I put lights,” Kosyuga said, and once he saw that the sunglasses were a success, he started wrapping strip lights around his legs. “The first time I did that people were asking [me] to do more. I was like ‘I’ll do more?’ It’s a challenge now.”

Kosyuga’s mission was to make each game a different experience for the fans, especially for the season ticket holders that want something new each time they return. The Sea Bears’ hype man asked himself the important question: “How do I make it as fun as possible for people that don’t necessarily just want to watch basketball?”

During the school year, Kosyuga studies marketing in Asper School of Business at the University of Manitoba. And his time studying in the classroom has paid dividends for his courtside job.

“What I’ve learned from marketing is helping me bring it into the Sea Bears world — the entertainer world,” he said, noting he has an ongoing spreadsheet of what his plan is for each game.

He continues to study crowd engagement game by game, focusing on what works and removing what doesn’t.

In comes the suit with over 6,000 LED lights — a soon to be Guinness World Record.

At first, Kosyuga used his own coding to make the suit do what he wanted — something he learned from endless hours on YouTube. Once he realized that his knowledge was limited and what he wanted to do was outside his wheelhouse, he reached out to a team in Poland.

Kosyuga scouted this team after seeing an impressive synchronized light display across multiple costumes on the show The Masked Singer Poland. He went down a rabbit hole to find their contact information and once he reached out, they simply replied with, “Say less, send the suit. We’ll go from there.”

Although they told Kosyuga his ideas were crazy, they made his dreams become reality, rewriting the software and making it workable with Kosyuga’s plans. From there, he only got more creative.

“I started collecting sounds from the game,” Kosyuga explained. “Using my glasses — let’s say someone scored a three-pointer — my suit would react to that.”

“The bigger the sound was from the crowd the more effect my suit had.”

Kids in the crowd have started following his lead, wrapping themselves in fairy lights to mimic Kosyuga’s outfits, lighting up the arena even further.

“If everything goes dark, [we] will still be lit up and everybody will see it,” he joked.

These mini Kosyuga fans often scream his name — focusing more on his act rather than the game itself — while asking him how they can become him. He has become an idol to many in which his advice to all the little ones is to simply follow their passion.

When working with other departments on the Sea Bears team, they often know Kosyuga has a light bulb moment when he approaches them with, “OK, I have an idea.” In fact, Kosyuga works with all the members of the organization to make each game day special, even if it’s a spur of the moment idea.

“Sometimes it happens literally as it happens,” Kosyuga said as not all ideas are given the chance to have the green light, but Kosyuga added, “we’re going to ask for forgiveness — then permission.”

And if fans have ever witnessed the mascot Churchill Bear go WWE on a table with a plastic snake on it in their first season — that was a prime example.

Kosyuga remarks that he is given an environment where his imagination is allowed to run wild, emphasizing that “Everyone’s open to creativity.”

Looking into the future, Kosyuga is planning a long stay in the Winnipeg sports industry.

“I’ll keep doing it as long as the fans want me to keep doing it,” he said.

But don’t get too comfortable with Kosyuga’s current attire, he has something up his sleeve for upcoming seasons.

“I’ll use one word: pyro,” Kosyuga said. “I feel like there is something to explore outside of the lights and it’s something new.”

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