You’ll often see sports logos for high schools printed on sweaters and stuff that is identical to large sports teams.
Do the schools buy the rights, or is there something else going on?


26 comments

  1. Wasn’t it a retired Disney artist that drew the catalog and sold the rights to schools… I thought I read that somewhere

  2. The bad PR of a pro team suing a high school likely far outweighs the profit they would earn from licensing.

    “We support football on all levels and do not have an issue with high school and youth teams using NFL team logos,” said Brian McCarthy, director of corporate communications for the NFL in 2010.

  3. Most professional and college teams let lower schools use their logos and recolor them as needed. The reason you see it so often is simple: because it’s easy and the school legally gets away with it. No use making it more of a complicated process than it needs to be when you can just take the Alabama “A” and color it green or whatever for your high school.

  4. My cousins and I had the same highschool logo, 500 miles apart.

    I think schools are offered a deal on a logo that goes with uniforms/banners/etc from China in some big purchase thing, as it wasn’t always like that, it used to be much more unique.

    My high school actually changed while I was there to the new generic one, the original one was “hand made”.

    Now that I think about it, the same thing happened to my undergraduate logo during my time there as well…

  6. A lot of high school logos are designed by marketing firms and purchased by the school. The firms retain the rights to the logos and sell them to multiple schools.

  7. So many? Often? I have never seen a high school using a pro team’s logo. Same name? Maybe, but they can be pretty generic.

  8. The university I went to allowed high schools to license its logo for a nominal fee like $1 as sort of a gesture of goodwill. I wouldn’t be surprised if others and maybe even some pro sports teams do the same.

  9. A lot of the time, the pro/college teams the logos originally belong to are licensed to these high schools for some nominal amount – often just a dollar. They’re happy to let these high schools use their logos but they can’t allow wanton infringement or they lose their trademark, so this is an arrangement that works for all parties.

  10. It’s not like they look at what other schools somewhere in the country would have the same, and seeing as there are over 30k high schools in America, going through all of them just isn’t worth the time when no one is complaining about similar logos. The logos don’t mean much for a high school too, it’s mainly for the town and individual school, not so much for the country as a whole.

  12. There are so many high school in this country. It’d be damn near impossible to come up with a unique logo and mascot for all of them.

  13. “Who are we??”

    “THE WILDCATS!!!”

    “Who are we gonna beat?!”

    “THE WILDCATS!!!”

  14. the real answer’s been covered, but also there are 27,000 high schools in the US and a sports program is basically seen as a necessity. no one really has much incentive to reinvent the wheel here.

  15. Because they waste their budgets on things other than the logo unfortunately

  16. My high school used the Atlanta Falcons logo just mirrored and color swapped

  17. They will license the rights from pro or college teams for a cheap fee. This makes getting anything with the logo cheaper and the pro or college team get free advertising. My college has a fairly popular logo and the only rule is high schools can’t use the exact same color but can use a different shade of the color if the need it.

  18. Because there are a million high schools in the US. Major cities have at least a dozen.

  19. They don’t all have a ton of money to be hiring special designers to make new logos.

  20. My high school was/is the Raiders – because the students got to vote and Paul Revere and the Raiders were popular at the time. The mascot even has one of their weird outfits on, riding on a horse. Probably 99% of today’s students there don’t know this.

    Also, as a history major, the irony that Sparta, Missouri’s high school mascot is the Trojans never fails to make me smile.

  21. Most public high schools don’t have the resources to spend on a unique logo so they just color swap an existing logo. My high school for example was the Mustangs, our logo had a main and 2 alternates. The main logo was a recolored Denver Broncos logo, in maroon, white, and black, the alts were a recolored Colts logo in maroon and white, and just the letter I in a block font in maroon and white. That school isn’t even the only school in the state that are the maroon and white mustangs.

  22. There are only so many ways to draw a Mustang, a Tiger, a Bulldog and so on in a way that can be printed on a tshirt or on a field. It’s easier to just use a graphic that exists in the world. A school is unlikely to be sued by another school (who probably stole the graphic in the first place)

  23. You’ve received many good answers, but I will add that there are times where professional leagues sponsor youth programs in some regard, and the logos are presumably used as part of that agreement. This isn’t common with school teams, but it does happen with other youth leagues. For example, the NHL sponsors “Learn to Play” programs for youth across the country, and those teams are often named after NHL/AHL teams and use the NHL/AHL team logos.

  24. My high school uses the mascot of the nearby Big Ten university, the marching band uses a good chunk of their pregame show, and the school fight song is the university’s fight song with different lyrics.

  25. I didn’t know until years later that our logo was the Minnesota Vikings logo, but with green and gold instead of purple and gold.

    This was in Northern Virginia.

  26. Certain things are stereotypical as mascots and there are 20-something thousand high schools. you’re going to get some duplication even before you get into the club sports, other grades, etc…

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