Did your high school copy a pro or college team?

[beachperroAZ]

My first High School in White Swan, Washington on the Yakama Indian Reservation copied the Washington State University Cougars with the name and the "COUGARS" cursive script that they used to use when Ryan Leaf and Drew Bledsoe went to Pullman for school.  We used scarlet red and black uniforms with white helmets that had the cougar script.  My senior year I went to a new high school in Idaho called the Middleton Vikings.  We used royal and gold with the Minnesota Vikings head logo as the school emblem.  On our yellow helmets & royal baseball caps we had an old english M for middleton.    I am not certain but I think that in the 80's early 90's they may have used blue helmets with the white Minnesota Vikings horns. 

[MilSox]

The Mighty Tigers of Milwaukee Riverside wore this on our football helmets and basketball shorts when I was a student.

 

[Discrim]

On 2/8/2023 at 2:26 PM, maz said:

Also, when we had an ice hockey team, they just took the Blackhawks logo and stuck it on a Flames jersey. Which is partially why I just wore a Chicago Blackhawks shirt I had to football games (where I saw Aaron Donald play before any of you did ).

I'll venture to guess it was impossible for just one lineman to stop him back then too  

 

Basically ever since they opened, my high school's had a long tradition of copying the Eagles in some manner, though like @RyanMcD29's employer, back in the day the other sports went with something of a hodgepodge, for instance I recall the basketball shorts used the eagle Kent State was using in the 80s without the thunderbolt.  For almost three decades, the helmets featured the older Eagle wings on white shells, basically identical to what Philly wore in the early 70s (as a bonus, paired with Packers uniforms from the neck down early on, though by the time I got there a small mural was the only evidence of that set), and then in the mid 90s it got inverted to white wings on green.  Amusingly enough, our green jerseys were almost identical to the jerseys the Packers almost switched to in 94, with eagles on the sleeves instead of G's (the eagle below is slightly modified, mostly the eye but also the extra coloring is removed; when I was there, we were using the eagle unmodified beyond replacing silver with gold).

 

Coincidentally, UW Whitewater briefly copied the Philly eagle too, before adopting a hawk head that's clearly inspired by it, but is just different enough.

[JerseyJimmy]

mine has two logos - the first I'm pretty sure is an original, but the second is a blue/black/white recolor of the AFL's Carolina Cobras that admittedly looks quite nice

 

[spockEars7]

Pflugerville High School (TX) uses a recolored Purdue P. 

 

[rainmaker17]

When I went to W.T. White hs in Dallas they looked exactly like the Texas Longhorns, helmet logo and all. Now it's the same basic color scheme with a stylized "W" on the helmet.

[8BW14]

Oooh this is fun. I’ll play. My alma mater, the South Fulton Rebels mainly use recolored 49ers and UNLV logos. In the past the baseball team has used the SF giants cap logo as well. The unique thing about South Fulton is the purple/green color scheme.

 

(Not our stadium, that’s Western Illinois University’s turf. We played on a glorified cow pasture)

 

Forgot about this one:

I hate it and I think it’s a riddell clip art logo.

 

This is the UNLV logo used mostly, it’s on one of the basketball floors, recolored in purple/green obviously:

[maz]

 

Came back to share how one of my school's biggest rivals, the Plum Mustangs, always copied the Denver Broncos but made them purple and gold...

 

...but has recently begun bastardizing the Pitt script instead.

 

Their ice hockey team appears to still use the Broncos logo, with a Capitals-esque wordmark, on throwback LA Kings unis...

 

I always give a pass to teams copying unis, however, since it is easy and cheap to get bulk jerseys on existing templates.

 

 

[kmccarthy27]

My Freshman year in High School I went to a high school in MD called Westlake HS and somehow adopted the Dolphins colors but they adopted the Wolverine mascot. So the first year of the school opening the opted everything Michigan just with a Teal, Orange and White color scheme. When I went back to visit some friends a couple of years later the Michigan stuff was relegated to JV and all the Varsity team branding went to Wisconsin  with Teal, Orange and White. 

 

The school I graduated from Calvert HS in MD, were the Cavaliers and went I went there had adopted all the Virginia branding with a C in place of the V. 

 

[AstroCree]

My high school colors were Green, Black and White. The baseball team had a recolored Pittsburgh Pirates hat but the logo was green instead of yellow. 

[4_tattoos]

I went to Crossland High School in Temple Hills, MD. Home of the Cavaliers.

 

My introduction to CHS came when my older brother started going there. The football team at that time had a generic cavalier/musketeer/swashbuckler/fancy pirate decal on the helmets. My junior and senior years at CHS we had a University of Virginia crossed swords logo on our helmets with an old English C in place of the V. The year after I graduated the football team got new uniforms and began wearing a Chicago Cubs style C on the helmets. About 3 years after that the football team went to another variation of the UVA logo that I can only describe as imagining if a C was in the same font as the V in the UVA logo. It was actually my avatar on this board for several years. There were old team photos from the 70s and 80s in the coaches offices wear the team had the Buccaneer Bruce logo on the sleeves.

 

In the early 2010s  the boys basketball had Buccaneer Bruce on their shorts. Prior to that the basketball teams wore the Cleveland Cavaliers sword logo (the one the resemble a cent sign) on a lot of stuff.

 

About 5 years ago the current principal wanted the school to have a unified identity, so an all purpose (academic and athletic) logo was created for the school. And yes, the football team has worn this on their helmets since 2018. Small print and hashtag included

 

[4_tattoos]

On 2/17/2023 at 10:05 AM, kmccarthy27 said:

My Freshman year in High School I went to a high school in MD called Westlake HS and somehow adopted the Dolphins colors but they adopted the Wolverine mascot. So the first year of the school opening the opted everything Michigan just with a Teal, Orange and White color scheme. When I went back to visit some friends a couple of years later the Michigan stuff was relegated to JV and all the Varsity team branding went to Wisconsin  with Teal, Orange and White.

Small world. My school played Westlake in our season opener my 9th and 10th grade years (1999 and 2000). Westlake's varsity football team was definitely a hybrid of the Miami Dolphins and Wisconsin Badgers from what I remember. 

[monkeypower]

My high school had this logo.

 

However, some teams used the Arizona Cardinals logo for a number of years, including for my first two years playing football, but then my last year (high school is only three years where I live) us football team switched to this other cardinal decal on the helmets (with the Arizona logo still on our jerseys).

 

 

The football team continued to use that other decal up until apparently a couple years ago and now they're using an updated version of the old school logo which I didn't know existed until looking up the logos to post here. So the school must have rebranded at some point in the nearly a decade since I graduated and I don't know which, if any, other teams are using this new logo or if some are still using the Arizona logo or if some are even still using the old logo.

[Discrim]

On 2/18/2023 at 5:22 PM, insert name said:

My high school colors were Green, Black and White. The baseball team had a recolored Pittsburgh Pirates hat but the logo was green instead of yellow. 

I recall some years back, the college in between Racine and Kenosha, UW Parkside, their baseball team wore the Pirates P on their caps (green outlined in white rather than gold)  and wore a tweaked version of the Rangers' old lettering on their white jerseys, in green letters outlined in white and black.  Not sure what they're wearing now.

[Korkie]

For a long time my high school alma mater used a red and black Memphis Grizzlies logo since we are the Bears. We are now using an original, but not as well designed bear head. I love the version we used when I was a kid. I loved it back then too, but I understand it was dated in that it was too detailed and probably hard to reproduce, especially in smaller applications. 

[BBTV]

I don't know how educators can teach kids not to steal, and to be creative, and then steal other people's work for their sports uniforms.

 

It's basically like "remember kids, stealing is bad, unless you don't have the budget to make it yourself".

[jzn110]

A lot of high schools in Michigan use recolored variations of Michigan's winged helmet design.

[chcarlson23]

32 minutes ago, BBTV said:

I don't know how educators can teach kids not to steal, and to be creative, and then steal other people's work for their sports uniforms.

 

It's basically like "remember kids, stealing is bad, unless you don't have the budget to make it yourself".

I never understood this either. Especially since there are probably both staff and students at every high school, creative enough to come up with a logo that’s unique. Sure inspiration isn’t bad, like especially if you’re the Cardinals or the Eagles, you could already guess what style logo any given school might go with.
 

But there’s no reason for these schools to blatantly rip off a logo. There’s gotta be a kid in the art department could whip something up just as fast as going, “Oh that pro team has our name, their logo is ours now,” and then changing the colors. 
 

The other thing is that it could be a lazy athletic director or coach, and they could care less about education and academics, so they just plagiarize logos…

 

[BBTV]

41 minutes ago, jzn110 said:

A lot of high schools in Michigan use recolored variations of Michigan's winged helmet design.

 

It's not "Michigan's" design.  I think that would fall into the category of "free use" unless Michigan was somehow able to TM an uber-traditional design that lots of pro and amateur teams have used since helmets started being painted in the first place.  It's a little lacking for effort, but I don't take issue with it the same way I would with someone recoloring MSU's spartan logo and calling it a day.

[LAWeaver]

My high school never used a college or pro design, but several teams in our area did. 

 

A few years ago, the Maysville Panthers (Zanesville, OH) received $25,000 in new helmets from the Cleveland Browns organization. The team has used them ever since, donning a chrome royal-blue Carolina Panthers logo on one side and numbers on the other. 

 

Across the Muskingum River in Duncan Falls, the Philo Electrics, as you might have guessed, use different versions of the Chargers' iconic lightning bolts on the helmet and jerseys.

 

Up the river in Dresden, the Tri-Valley Scotties do have a scottish terrier logo, but lately they seem to have opted for a flipped Virginia Tech "TV" logo instead:

 

 

In Coshocton and Caldwell, both teams use modified Chiefs logos and, in Caldwell's case, they also use a stolen @davidson concept. 

The Cambridge Bobcats use a black-and-white Ohio Bobcats logo:

 

The Berne Union Rockets (Sugar Grove, OH) use a red-and-gold, heavily-inspired Toledo Rockets logo:

In Ashville, the Teays Valley Vikings use both a blue-and-gold Minnesota Vikings logo AND a flipped Virginia Tech logo: