Fullerton Flyers

The Golden Baseball League continues to churn out logos in preparation for their inaugural 2005 season. The latest logo to be released is for the Fullerton Flyers, a team that will be playing all of their home games at Goodwin Field on the campus of Cal State Fullerton. Goodwin Field is also home to the Cal State Fullerton Titans baseball team and the logos for the Flyers really remind you of their stadium mates.

The similarities between the two teams are striking and interesting. From what I can tell so far, the Flyers colors are exactly the same colors as the Titans. Both teams use navy blue as their base with orange and light blue accents. Both teams hats are going to be Navy with a the "F" logo, the only difference is that the Flyers use a different font and use white as the fill with an orange border instead of orange fill and a white border.

These similarities are really interesting from a marketing standpoint. Do you want to be closely associated with a super popular and successful college program or do you want to distance yourself from them and attempt to produce your own identity? Unfortunately there is no right answer. Either way you go, there are major risks associated.

By picking a similar logo and color scheme the team runs the risk of associating themselves too closely with the Titans to the point where casual fans may not understand that the Flyers are independent from the college. Are they a JV team? A club team? What's the deal? On the other hand you have instant recognition. Most likely fans hear the name and see the logo and automatically associate them with the success of the Titans program and become immediately interested because of that success.

Conversely, if you go a totally different route and use a different color scheme and distance yourself from the Titans you run the risk of having absolutely no recognition to the casual fan. People might not have any idea who you are or where you are from.

There obviously is a ton more to this issue that influenced their decision. My theory on why they decided to use these colors is simple and a bit cynical. I'd be willing to bet that most everything in Goodwin Field is geared toward the Titans including the colors of the seats, logos on walls, etc. The Flyers didn't want to clash with all of these colors and accents and look like a random team obviously playing in a stadium that isn't theirs. Makes perfect sense to me. It's also nice to ride the coattails of the popular and successful Titans program.