Today in the Ticker: Green stirrups for St. Patrick’s Day, an English soccer club uses its big stage to advocate for equal FA Cup prize money, and more.
Uni Watch News Ticker for March 20, 2023
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Baseball
MLB
- Yesterday’s edition of a newsletter from MLB.com Phillies writer Todd Zolecki mentions the recent trademarking of “Bedlam at the Bank,” a call by their radio announcer Scott Franzke during Game 5 of the 2022 NLCS, as well as some other trademarks and logos that the team let expire. (From Kurt Esposito)
- Yesterday’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette featured a column from a former Post-Gazette copyeditor who worked as a vendor at Pirates and Steelers games, mostly writing about the last years of the Pirates’ Forbes Field. (From Doug Keklak)
Softball
- Florida softball players wore green stirrups for St. Patrick’s Day on Friday.
More
- Ohio State baseball revealed an early-1900s throwback — at least in terms of the chest logo — yesterday. (From @cbusbj99)
- Georgia baseball has new white jerseys. (From Mike Givler)
Football
CFL
- The Roughriders held a charity ice hockey game on Saturday. “They did a really good job designing a good-looking Roughriders hockey uniform using the club’s vintage ‘S’ logo as the crest. Both a green and a white uniform,” says Wade Heidt.
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- Skyline (Idaho) HS revealed its championship rings for last season’s state championship. (From Kary Klismet)
Basketball
College
- South Carolina women’s coach Dawn Staley wore a jersey from Cheyney University on the bench yesterday. As then-Cheyney State, the school played in the first NCAA-sanctioned Division I women’s final in 1982 despite then as now being a Division II school, and is still the only HBCU to reach any Division I Final Four.
- Here’s two overviews on Saint Mary’s (Calif.) and Iona’s “Gaels” name and Xavier’s “Musketeers” name, as well as Xavier’s blue blob mascot. (From Kary Klismet)
- Fairleigh Dickinson does not have a band, so the University of Dayton’s band represented them in the men’s NCAA tourney. (From John Flory)
More
- The Athletes Unlimited basketball league held a promotion on Saturday that it does for all its sports where players promote a charity of their choice by wearing warm-up shirts, and AU makes donations equal to each player’s win bonus for the season.
Hockey
NHL
- FDNY commish Laura Kavanagh wore a pretty cool jersey for the ceremonial puck drop ahead of last night’s Rangers/Preds game. (From Alan Kreit)
Minors/Juniors
- The WHL’s Saskatoon Blades wore their winner of the CHL’s “Your Team Your Jersey” contest on Saturday. (From Wade Heidt)
- The WHL’s Portland Winterhawks wore jerseys on Saturday based on those worn in 1936 by the first incarnation of the Portland Buckaroos, who played in the minor men’s Pacific Coast Hockey League. The team also retired No. 21 for former NHL winger Cam Neely. (From Wade Heidt)
- On Friday, the WHL’s Vancouver Giants wore Canucks-colored St. Patrick’s Day tribute jerseys to Pat Quinn, who was a part-owner of the Giants and also played for and coached the Canucks. (From Wade Heidt)
- The Junior A British Columbia Hockey League’s Cowichan Capitals and Powell River Kings played a red vs. green game on Saturday, which as Wade Heidt points out is probably the worst kind of color vs. color game because of colorblindness issues.
Soccer
USA
- The USL Championship’s Loudoun United have a new pony mascot, currently named Loudoun Pegasus as a placeholder, and they’re looking for a name for it. The top five name choices were apparently to be announced at yesterday’s home opener, but I didn’t see them. (From Kary Klismet)
International
- Denmark: New shirts for the men’s and women’s national teams. (From Germán Cabrejo)
- England: Lewes (white/black/white) and Manchester United (mono-highlighter) wore second and third kits, respectively, for yesterday’s women’s FA Cup quarterfinal. Lewes have also advocated for equal prize money in the men’s and women’s cups for several years and yesterday wore warm-up shirts saying “Equal FA Cup.” That came a few days after they published a letter to former England winger Karen Carney, the head of a UK government review on the future of women’s soccer, pointing out that progressing from the third round to the quarterfinals as they did pays out 10 times more to a men’s team than a women’s team and that the prize money gap actually widened this season.
- Germany: Arminia Bielefeld striker Fabian Klos broke the club’s appearances record in their men’s 2. Bundesliga game on Friday, so they wore a shirt with his face added to the front.
Cricket
- Major League Cricket, the new US men’s Twenty20 league, updated its logo yesterday. (From R. Scott Rogers)
- Four more MLC team names were revealed recently: MI New York, the Los Angeles Knight Riders, San Francisco Unicorns, and Seattle Orcas. The New York and Los Angeles teams share ownership with the Indian Premier League’s Mumbai Indians and Kolkata Knight Riders, respectively.
Wrestling
- “Air Force wrestler Wyatt Hendrickson had some amazing headgear for the NCAA Championships,” says Kary Klismet.
Grab Bag
- Australia’s Super Netball’s West Coast Fever raised a 2022 championship banner at this weekend’s season opener.
- On the topic of SN, I didn’t see any players wearing the substitute legwear I wrote about last week, even though the article I linked in that piece contained confirmation from SN that they would be allowed to do so this season.
- The NLL’s Calgary Roughnecks wore St. Patrick’s Day-themed jerseys on Friday, also changing their logo to include a leprechaun. (From Jared Buccola and Wade Heidt)
- The NLL’s New York Riptide wore jerseys supporting the Boomer Esiason Foundation, which fights cystic fibrosis, on Saturday. (From Wade Heidt)
- Hart HS, in Santa Clarita, Calif., voted in 2021 to retire its “Indians” name by 2025. In the meantime, it’s looking for a replacement and revealed a student mural done with the “coordination” of the ancestral Native American residents of the area. (From Kary Klismet)
- Pitt is planning a new athletics facility and a small arena for gymnastics, volleyball, and wrestling. (From Kary Klismet)
- A new study apparently done by a certain sports betting company found that Ohio State’s Brutus the Buckeye is the most popular college mascot, at least based on the unclear methodology it used. (From Kary Klismet)
- Here’s a few-years-old New York Times piece on the design of astronauts’ Moon boots. (From Tom Turner)
- Meanwhile, the astronauts who might return to the Moon in 2025 have a new suit design. Astronaut-turned-Senator Mark Kelly apparently isn’t a fan. (From Michael Hochman and Aaron Rupar)
Comments (19)
As a proud UGA alum, I’m digging the new cream Sunday uniforms. Now we just need to NOT get swept by South Carolina lol
Cheyney is no longer Division II, they dropped that status prior to the 2018-19 school year and are unaffiliated with a conference of NCAA division. Currently they play only Division III and community colleges.
And it looks like the Cheyney jersey is the real thing; the jock tag is from Medalist-Sand Knit.
Worth noting that the Mumbai Indians are named for the demonym of people in the country of India, and do not refer in any way to indigenous peoples in the Americas. Seems odd to me to have such a name applied in full to a team in USA, but I guess they’re trying to follow the City method of brand-building from football.
There’s OL Reign in the NWSL, where the “OL” stands for the parent team Olympique Lyonnaise (the Reign play in Seattle).
In addition to MI New York there is also MI Cape Town and MI Emirates. I agree it is a bit clunky and wonder if Mumbai Indians would have chosen a different name if they had foreseen the trend of Indian Premier League teams owning teams in other leagues. Other teams like the Knight Riders have team names that work better in multiple countries.
I absolutely hate this cynical behaviour. Just seems like unfettered contempt for your potential new fan base to openly advertise that their new team isn’t really their new team, but simply an offshoot of this more important team that has no connection to you whatsoever.
At one level, it feels like owners approaching the situation like a Risk board, just concerned with seeing their colour pieces occupy more and more space on the board.
This is why I will always dislike both MLS New York teams. One is presented as a farm club for Manchester City, and the other as a company team for an energy drink.
Bring back the Cosmos already, even if that means buying out the IP rights that have always been the hangup with MLS.
The Forbes Field article is cool; however, the Post-Gazette’s union writers are on strike, so many local media folks like me have been avoiding sharing links to them while the strike continues so as not to cross the digital picket line.
The FDNY sweater looks like the old FDNY hockey team logo. link
Edit: The FDNY commissioner is Laura Kavanagh
Fixed.
I’m baffled by MI NY as a name. Is it Mumbai Indians or is it New York? Or is it only Indians from Mumbai who are on a NY team? They couldn’t come up with anything else? Even the NY Apples would’ve been better
I assume the intent is to duplicate the thing where most teams owned by Manchester City FC are also called City, with similar light-blue-and-white branding and circular badges: NY City, Melbourne City, Mumbai City, etc. But it is indeed unfortunate even if one accepts that affiliated branding thing as normal and not regrettable. (Back when the default for minor-league baseball clubs was to adopt the parent club’s name, like the Cedar Rapids Reds of my youthful hometown, I disliked that phenomenon too.) In this instance, USA Cricket is overtly trying to grow interest in the game beyond the stereotypical South Asian immigrant audience. (A stereotype in this case because it’s significantly true. The South Asian immigrant community really is the beating heart of American cricket.) So Mumbai Indians New York speaks _to_ the existing South Asian fan base but doesn’t offer a hook for new fans to get drawn in ad expand connection to the sport.
On the other hand, it’s all vaporware, since none of these teams will play games in their “home” cities. Major League Cricket is a short tournament that will be played entirely in Texas. “My” team is the Washington Freedom, none of whose players will likely ever set foot within 800 miles of the best cricket pitch in DC, which is in a park in my old neighborhood in Northern Virginia. The team names are just brands, and so even more meaningless than usual.
The difference being that “city” and a color scheme are objects or a collective of arbitrary people, whereas Mumbai Indians is pretty specific. It doesn’t work for this case and I don’t know how keen NY fans will be to identify with a team named after a city and people across the globe.
It was a normal practice of soccer clubs in the US thru most of the 20th century to wear ethnic club names. That reflected the reality that the clubs were a product of ethnic neighborhoods in cities. An extreme example was Kearny, New Jersey, which had teams in the second American Soccer League named the Keary Irish and the Kearny Scots. One of the top regional leagues was Chicago’s German-American League. The last example of that at the top level was Toronto Metros-Croatia in the NASL. It clearly was recognized by then as an albatross.
But if you’re starting up from scratch in a new country, I guess you play to your existing crowd until you can pay the bills.
Gaels?
As someone of Irish ancestry, I’m offended.
So, UConn’s men beat the Gaels and the Gaels in the same weekend. Is this some sort of precedent?
One note about MLC’s Texas Super Kings: they’re also owned by an IPL team, Chennai Super Kings.