Club sports leaders spoke out at a CU Student Government Legislative Council meeting Thursday against a proposal to change the logos of club sports teams and put club sports in line with CU’s “Be Boulder” branding initiative that was introduced last spring.
Representatives of club sports said that they were blindsided by the university’s demand for them to comply with the new initiatives within a certain amount of time or lose funding.
“We are against the club sports branding initiatives and the implications it has for our team,” said Meghan Lukens, a representative for the CU women’s hockey team.
The re-branding would force the women’s hockey team to buy new uniforms and warm-ups, which the women’s hockey team “simply doesn’t have the money” for, Meghan Lukens said.
Penn Lukens, a representative of the men’s lacrosse team, objected to the proposed logos, particularly the use of the term “club sports.”
“To say we are a club makes it sound like we are traveling down the road to play Longmont and Broomfield teams. It is insulting and demeaning to our teams,” Penn Lukens said.
Devan Corona, a representative of the freestyle ski team, said that the branding would hurt the freestyle team, which maintains its own brand and changes its logo every year. He called the club sports label a “scarlet letter.”
“The only entity on campus that knows how to brand freestyle ski team is the freestyle ski team,” Corona said.
“We are the highest level of rugby. The term ‘club’ is just going to kill us in recruiting,” Kevin Howes, a representative of the rugby team, said.
Howes said that as the fundraising chair for CU rugby, he has $1,000 frozen for the branding, which he said would be “devastating” financially.
“We are largely funded by outside sources,” Howes said.
CUSG Director of Health and Safety Tyler Romero introduced a resolution to the legislative council supporting the rejection of the branding initiatives, which passed on first reading. The resolution will be read again next week.
Jon Leslie, CU’s vice chancellor for strategic marketing, said that club sports embody what “Be Boulder” stands for, and that the communication with club sports could have been better.
Leslie proposed a plan for university communications to work individually with each team to understand the teams’ histories and cultures. Leslie said that most of the clubs’ logos will work as-is, or with minor tweaks. He also agreed to remove the term “club sports” from any proposed logos.
“Ultimately, we don’t want a label placed on any of our athletes that diminishes the motivation or pride that they feel,” Leslie said. “We’re going to move forward team-by-team and find logos that work for them.”
Leslie said that he thinks club sports aligning with the university’s brand will help club sports financially.
“I think higher visibility could lead to avenues for funding that currently don’t exist,” Leslie said.
Leslie said that a big part of the new branding is confusion between club sports and CU’s intercollegiate varsity sports.
“It’s hard to promote the teams as they are because there is such a risk of confusion,” Leslie said. “It’s also hard to promote club sports as a whole because of all the individual differences between clubs.”
“The logos proposed by us were an effort to clearly communicate the roles these groups play in the university community,” Leslie said. “We want to create a space for these teams to celebrate their achievements that is slightly different from the space occupied by our intercollegiate athletics teams.”
Contact CU Independent Breaking News Editor Sam Klomhaus at samuel.klomhaus@colorado.edu.
