SENSE OF UNITY: Greenfield-Central updates brand, unveils new logos

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GREENFIELD — It seems like anywhere you turn at Greenfield-Central High School, you’ll see a different Cougars logo, a different-looking G-C symbol.

Look at 10 people wearing Cougars apparel, and you might see 10 different logos. Look at the wall in the gym — that’s different than some of them. The athletic department offices have multiple logos. A logo painted on the sidewalk in front of the football concession stand is unique from all the rest.

That’s all changing. Things are going to start looking a bit different at Greenfield-Central, a process that began a while ago and officially kicked off Friday night during the boys and girls basketball doubleheader against New Palestine.

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That afternoon, the installation and setup of four new digital displays was completed. The displays rotated information, including pictures of current Greenfield-Central teams, season records, team schedules, concession menus and announcements.

Also among those presentations was the biggest reveal — new logos for the teams.

Those logos mark the official start of a large-scale effort to create a unified brand for the school, the athletic teams and the community.

“At the high school we have so many different groups, clubs and teams, and everybody was kind of doing their own thing,” Greenfield-Central Athletic Director Jared Manning said. “We were to the point where we wanted to not rebrand us and come up with something completely different, but take what we had and the pieces and parts that we liked and try to mold it into something that could represent all of us.”

The idea of creating new logos and a unified brand was one that people around the school had been talking about for quite some time.

Things started moving ahead after the school’s athletic directors— Manning and Assistant Athletic Director Elizabeth Mercer — went to the annual National Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association and Indiana Interscholastic Athletic Administrator’s Association conferences. They met with vendors and brought back information from them, and that’s when school officials started looking into options.

The big conversations started in the spring, and things started to move forward.

“The big thing for us is, anytime we brought somebody in, one of the things that they would say is, ‘What’s our logo? Send me a logo. I want to use it on my signature, on my email.’ We just got to a point of, which one do we send? We had so many different Cougar heads,” Manning said. “What we wanted to do was kind of put something together that unified everybody. One of the things that we tried really hard to do was not lose what we had before.”

A lot of conversations were had with a variety of people. Coaches were consulted. Teachers, student-athletes, administrators, central office personnel: Opinions and feedback were sought from all over the Greenfield-Central community.

It was important to get things as close to perfect as possible.

“We wear it all the time, and it’s going to be here,” Greenfield-Central Principal Jason Cary said. “We really wanted it to be something that we were going to be happy with, and we are. It’s turned out better than we could have hoped, I think.”

Getting to that point proved to be not as easy as school officials hoped.

The school hired Varsity Brands to create the new branding and logos. A core group from Greenfield-Central would sit down and sift through multiple variations of logos presented to them as the process pushed ahead.

There were really good logos. There were really bad logos. School officials would make tweaks, make new suggestions. They wondered if they were being too picky.

It was a longer, more-complicated process than one might expect.

“We thought we would just see it and think that’s it, that’s our one,” Cary said. “We weren’t getting that. We felt like we were being too critical, or they weren’t understanding what we wanted. Literally we just got one email, and we were all together when we got it, and we knew that’s it. That’s the one. We’re happy we were as patient as we were.”

Once they reached that point, once they got the final product they were happy with, things started to move quickly.

The new logos were decided upon. The digital displays were installed and now show those logos. It’s the start of a longer, more complicated process. It was the first of many steps to come.

“Everything from this point on that’s Greenfield-Central is going to have these logos on it,” Manning said. “We’re not going to stray from that. I think that’s important for everybody to understand. This is our logo. This is Greenfield-Central’s logo. It’s not just for athletics. It’s for everything that happens here at Greenfield-Central High School.”

Future steps

With new logos comes new … pretty much everything.

Jerseys will need to change. Signage will need updates. Courts and fields will undergo transformations. It’s not going to happen overnight, but some bigger changes will come in the near future.

The athletic department is working on getting all the necessary information packets about the changes to apparel companies they use. The first apparel change is likely coming in the form of new basketball jerseys. They will be adorned with the new branding and will hopefully arrive within the new few weeks, Manning said.

The school is working on a signage agreement with Hancock Regional Hospital. Some of the new logos will start appearing at more Greenfield-Central venues.

Teachers, coaches and others around the school are scheduled to get access to the new logos this week. The athletic department’s Twitter and Facebook pages have been updated.

Within the next few weeks, everything associated with the high school athletic department and high school website will be updated.

It started with the digital displays, which was an exciting and important step for the school.

“We’re not done yet, which is exciting,” Manning said. “We’re looking forward to continuous change. This gives us a lot of flexibility on how we can update our records, and how we can get our kids’ pictures out there and celebrate the kids that are on our teams. We’re excited about it, and this is just another big piece to all of that.”

An important piece driving the changes was looking to the future while preserving some aspects of the past.

This isn’t a total rebranding. The school isn’t changing nicknames. You’ll see still Cougar heads and G-C logos. The difference is they will all start looking the same, sooner rather than later.

School officials are thrilled with what they’ve been able to come up with. Now, they are eager to show the changes to the community.

“We’ve taken the history of Greenfield-Central, and we’ve continued to move it forward,” Manning said. “We’re excited about that, and we hope they are as well. We hope that we’ve created a brand that’s going to last for a very long time. We look forward to everybody celebrating that, creating a little bit more pride in our program, our school, our community.”