Inside Baseball

Our man Dave Fairbank spent a day with the lads at OBFT last weekend, which is questionable decision-making on his part. Despite that, he managed to put together this inside view on the new W&M logo launch. And now you know...the rest of the story.

Last week, William and Mary athletics unveiled several new logos and marks that its teams will use as identifiers in the coming years. I had an advance look at the logos and spoke to a handful of folks in the athletic department about them and the process behind the changes.

An assistant athletic director asked me to write a story to accompany the rollout, not because I have any graphic design or brand marketing expertise (I do not), but as a longtime newspaper keyboard jockey in Newport News, Va., who covered the teams for years, he believed me capable of constructing a piece that hit the proper notes for what they were doing. Or he took pity on a freelance typist looking for beer money.

If you haven't seen them, the athletic logos are a bit bolder and more eye-catching than the present edition. More important, they lean on the school name, rather than the athletic teams' nickname. The thinking was that William and Mary, a 325-year-old institution that has produced U.S. presidents (Jefferson, Monroe, Tyler), comedians (Jon Stewart, Patton Oswalt, Michelle "Smokey Eye" Wolf), business giants (Walt Zable, Mark McCormack, Joe Plumeri), acting Glenns (Scott and Close), and unusually tall law enforcement administrators who contributed to our present daily news cycle dyspepsia (looking at you, James Comey) has far greater cachet than a synonym for "group."


The new primary logo is an angled W&M. A secondary logo incorporates the athletic mascot, the Griffin, a mythical creature that for William and Mary purposes has the head of an eagle and the body of a kinesiology major. The athletic teams will continue to be known as the Tribe, but the description will be phased out of uniforms, apparel and most visual representations - courts, fields, signage, etc.

What ramped up the push for new logos and re-branding efforts, so the tale goes around the athletic department, was a chance encounter in an elevator last fall. New athletic director Samantha Huge and football coach Jimmye Laycock were in Chapel Hill, N.C., the night before W&M's football game at nearby Elon. A gentleman on the elevator asked about the "Tribe" script on Laycock's clothing. Laycock explained that it referred to William and Mary. The gentleman, a Midwesterner and Notre Dame fan in town for the Fighting Irish's game versus UNC, said he knew about William and Mary and Williamsburg and was very complimentary. Huge said that, by the time she stepped off the elevator, she knew they had a branding problem. Tribe simply didn't resonate with enough people outside the circle. Nine months, and hundreds of hours of samples, trials, discussions and effort later, they have refurbished logos and brands that everyone appears pretty stoked about.

Short of William and Google, or Apple and Mary, I don't know that new logos and branding at a mid-size university would move the needle much for me. But as some have pointed out in this corner and elsewhere, folks of my vintage aren't the target audience. Sure, clothes makers and the school bookstore would like to sell as much new swag as possible to all ages and sizes, but this is aimed at youngsters, who are increasingly visual and are bombarded with images constantly.

Shaver might think the logo will help. I think Nathan
Knight will help more.

Hoops coach Tony Shaver and women's soccer coach Julie Shackford were genuinely jazzed about the new logos and branding efforts. Shaver said that he believed that the bolder visual representation would help his team, and the department in general, take the next step. When I asked what the next step was, he replied: winning the conference tournament and getting to the NCAAs. I asked how a logo and amped-up visuals might accomplish that. He said that because kids, i.e., recruits, are so visually motivated, and because William and Mary casts such a broad recruiting net, catching the attention of one or two kids could make all the difference in a league as competitive as the CAA. He said that if W&M can at least catch a kid's attention, then the coaches and the school have ample attributes to sell. Shackford echoed some of Shaver's thoughts. She said that fresh logos and rebranding give the school a chance to re-set and present a new look to kids and parents. She spoke about how CAA peer James Madison had established a presence in the youth soccer hotbed of northern Virginia, and how William and Mary needed to wedge its way into the mix for top-shelf, in-state and regional recruits.

We wanted feathers.

New logos and rebranding aren't an end, but part of Huge's effort to pull the athletic department into the 21st century. Her stated aim is to excel athletically and academically, to compete for championships. That said, find an athletic department where that's not the goal. But she appears willing to rattle cages and make requests and spend money toward those ends. As someone who wandered around campus and through the hallways for years, dynamic was rarely a word I associated with William and Mary athletics. Most of the coaches were uniformly excellent and often maxed out their resources. But administratively, they would convene a panel to compose an outline to explore a study to present to a focus group. That approach might be fine in academic circles, but athletics must be a bit more agile.

William and Mary's re-branding and push toward greater visibility will cost money, the one area that I didn't get a handle on in my discussions with people there, because it seemed to be a floating target. New uniforms and warmups and signage and such aren't cheap, but more than manageable with an estimated $24 million athletic budget. The real money is going to come from facilities upgrades and paying coaches what they're worth. Money wasn't an issue at Huge's previous stop, senior associate athletic director at Texas A&M, where coaches' salaries alone were $24 million per year, according to the Texas Tribune, and which generated $211 million in revenue in fiscal year 2017, according to USA Today.

Without Power 5 conference money, and Texas money, the trick for dozens of other universities inlower-tier leagues, is to figure ways to stand out, to draw attention and to attract recruits. Logos and branding are a step in that direction. The folks in Tribeland maybe should have given a little more thought to Apple and Mary.

Different, but I like it.