What makes a Laker?
The cargo ship wheel is perhaps more recognizable inside the Oswego State campus boundaries than the Marano Campus Ice Arena or Al Roker.
The hunter green and golden yellow color scheme is everywhere, the student body has become numb to it.
Yellow and green clad students walk back-and-forth to class in head to toe Laker gear carrying similarly themed water bottles and lanyards. The Oswego State athletics’ brand is aesthetically unique — far from more traditional collegiate schemes of crimson or navy and white or gray.
The yellow and green identity, while not exclusive to Oswego, is associated with uniform standouts in most athletic leagues.
The Green Bay Packers are perhaps the most famous representative of this particular combination, standing alone in the largely conservatively dressed NFL.
It appears the uniform designers for Oswego’s now defunct football program drew some inspiration from Green Bay’s look. Here’s a look at the nicely outfitted Lakers circa 1970s.
The Oregon Ducks have become famous in recent years for hyper-branding their unique, traditional green and yellow identity, with outlandish variations in their football uniforms. Green Bay’s look has remained relatively unchanged throughout their history, like the Oakland Athletics in the MLB. The University of Oregon football and Baylor University basketball have evolved their own Oswego-like colors into full highlighter yellow worn on national television.
Michael Bielak, Director of Athletic Communications at Oswego State spoke specifically on the “brand identity” of the Athletic Department but admitted it is “mostly steeped in oral history.” He added, it is unlike an old game where the stats and numbers can be dug up, the entire athletics department’s visual identity is a bit more tough to pin down, especially before 2000.
A 12-member committee, made up of students and administrators was constructed in 2000 to develop a three-phase plan with the ultimate goal of overhauling Oswego’s visual identity. The committee composed a sophisticated project that required partnership with the private marketing firm Symbolic Inc. of Rochester.
The committee conducted a 400-plus person focus group, consisting of students, alumni, faculty, and administrators that tested multiple logo designs and color variations. Finally, in 2001, to conclude the arduous process, a final “Graphic Standards Manual” was created that outlined everything from official color names, to typeface and standardized whitespace for individual sport logos.
What is a “laker?”
While not the Tigers, Bulldogs, Knights or Wildcats, Oswego State’s Laker nickname is one of the more ordinary. NCAA athletic programs Divisions I through III, are filled with countless bizarre nicknames and mascots. It certainly isn’t in the category of the Billikens, Golden Flashes or Hoyas.
Grand Valley State, Mercyhurst, Lake Superior State and Clayton State all boast the Laker nickname.
The lake on which the college was built, Lake Ontario, is the smallest of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes were among the most important shipping and trading avenues in all of North America during the 19th and 20th centuries. Freight, food, steel, coal, and immigrants were all transported via large cargo ship back and forth for over a century. So much business was done through the Great Lakes that eventually the cargo vessels were given their own name, “lakers.”
Curiously, the “Green and Gold” of Oswego State may predate the obvious laker nickname. According to Tim Nekritz, Director of Web Communication, the press used a handful of names in the early 20th century to reference Oswego athletics. Nekritz said the 1910 athletic group was typically referred to as “The Normals.”
The Oswego Normals?
Other names, according to Nekritz, were equally peculiar. Occasionally they were referred to as simply, “The Green and Gold.” The “Hilltoppers” (a name now used by Western Kentucky), “The Professors,” and the “Zielman” (in honor of legendary school administrator, and current name of Oswego’s gymnasium, Max Ziel) were all used in the local press before the school had settled on single nickname. The November 16, 1954 issue was the Oswegonian’s first recorded reference to Oswego sports as “Lakers.”
Perhaps the first indication that the Laker was going to become the de facto nickname came two weeks later, according to Nekritz, in a Don McGann column “as if for emphasis, his article on an upcoming Oswego-Queens University basketball game called the hometown team “the Professors, or Lakers, as they will frequently be referred to in the future.”
However unimaginative the Laker name may seem, knowing it came from a student run newspaper and then picked up by the local beat writer brings some closure to anyone keeping score on such obscure historical snippets.
What is more, the students and faculty maintained their organically developed identity, Laker, green and gold for five decades before a marketing firm partnered with university bureaucrats to erect some scientific, cohesive “brand.”
For what it is worth, the project in 2000 seems to have come to some success. Oswego State, and its notorious hockey program, has a unique nautical theme related to our location on Lake Ontario and the cargo ships at the turn of the 19th century. It stands out in a conference, SUNYAC, that has two teams named the “Red Dragons.”
Paul Lukas writes the “Uni Watch” column for ESPN.com, described as the “the sports world’s foremost (okay, only) column devoted to uniform design,” on his website of the same name. The Uni Watch website is the only one of its kind dedicated to “the obsessive study of Athletics Aesthetics.”
Lukas had a take on the Laker look.
Athletics have always and will always be central to the identities of universities. Wins, losses, statistics, and school records are — rightly — more celebrated than the stripe pattern on the hockey team’s socks.
But before scores or rivalries, teams and schools fundamentally need to identify themselves. They rally around their mascot and think of clever slogans incorporating their names.
Laker pride has a ring to it.
It is easy to get immersed in a team’s never-ending cycle of recruiting, injuries or analytics. Sometimes sports are as captivating yet simple as what makes a Billiken, a Yankee, a Jayhawk, or Laker.
