By The 2018-2019 school year kicks off with yet another appearance of the GO BE????CH logo at Long Beach State. Slowly unveiled beginning last school year, the athletics department has gone full “BE????CH” mode.
For something that was meant to bring more national recognition to the Walter Pyramid, it looks like it was designed in about 10 seconds. A Division-I university with over 30,000 students deserves a better looking logo. A large amount of the student body would probably not even understand the meaning of the “????,” especially if they don’t keep up with the sports teams on campus.
Some might see the new logo and say, “Did they forget to attach the A? Is that a wedge symbol or a caret symbol?”
If you search “caret symbol” on Google you will find that it was basically copy and pasted for our new pyramid-inspired “A.” The new logo is a bad attempt at something that could look a lot better. It’s doing too much trying to incorporate the Pyramid directly into a logo.
This years’ incoming class of freshman will have no idea that the school’s alternate logo used to be, “The Beach” in a classic, jagged, script-type font. The script logo was well known for several reasons, one being that the Long Beach State men’s basketball team advanced to the NCAA tournament in 2012 with that logo.
Advancing to the tournament gave the school more national exposure and recognition, and the team also had two players who now play professionally: James Ennis and Casper Ware. With “The Beach” splattered across the bright gold jerseys, news and media outlets such as Yahoo! Sports and SB Nation praised Long Beach’s uniforms and logo, calling them “the coolest uniforms of any NCAA tournament team.”
There’s no clarity to what the school wants to identify itself with. There are old logos and signs around campus that have yet to be updated. I understand it’s a process to introduce a new logo, but why unveil a new logo if you can’t replace all of the older ones? All it has done is create a mix of old and new logos for a school that can’t seem to pick one official name for the campus.
When I was an incoming freshman in the Fall of 2015, the LBSU athletics department also went through a logo update just one year prior in 2014. The minor change went from an older looking “The Beach” script logo to just “Beach.”
This time, going from the “Beach” script logo to the quickly thought up “BE????CH,” is a lot more noticeable and different. I get the appeal to be different and modernize the brand, but the logo doesn’t fit Long Beach culture.
Logos nowadays play a much more important role in attracting student-athletes, especially for a mid-major school. Little things like this alternate school logo matter to prospective recruits and students. In today’s social media-driven world, brands have the ability to communicate a specific message to a large audience. I’m not sure what message we’re trying to send with the new logo. That we can’t spell?
While the “BE????CH” logo seems different and unique, it doesn’t fit the mold of a more modern, bold logo that can become a staple for the school’s identity. Don’t be surprised if we see another logo change within the next five years.
Double alumni here. Go BELCH!