Hill City Howlers

54

I suppose I should just be grateful and not complain.

Until this season this team was known as the Lynchburg Hillcats. The name wasn't bad, but the logo literally made my eyes hurt. I'm not going to put it in this review because I never want to see it again, so go look it up if you want. Basically it was a mad combination of blue, cyan, and green, three colors that are close enough to seriously clash when put directly next to each other without even thin black lines (which the logo lacked) to separate them. And it's gone. And I appreciate that.

But man, is the new logo a yawner! It's just a wordmark.

It's not like they couldn't come up with a drawing to represent a "howler". In fact, they came up with five, each based on a classic B-movie monster. But all of them seem to be relegated to secondary status. Maybe the problem is that there's five of them. If they had only made one, it could become the primary logo, but it seems they don't want to put one ahead of the others.

To me it seems obvious. Neither vampires nor golems nor mummies nor swamp creatures actually howl. Only werewolves do that. So make that the primary logo (add a wordmark next to it if you must, but it's really not necessary), make the others secondary logos, and call it a day.

But instead, the primary is just the wordmark, and all of the others are secondary.

And all of the above is ignoring another problem, which is that Hill City Howlers isn't a good name. First of all, the trend of using city nicknames for the locative rather than the actual city name is silly. Second, Howlers is just...odd. If you hear the word howler with no context, you're not going to think of a B-movie monster. No, not even a werewolf. You're probably going to think of a howler monkey, or maybe a really bad mistake. The first option isn't so bad, but given how superstitious baseball players and fans can be I don't think anything that hints at mistakes is a smart thing to name a team. I get that they chose the name for the alliteration, but is alliteration really that important? Just call the team the Lynchburg Werewolves. Or, if alliteration is so important, the Lynchburg Lycanthropes. But it's not important. Call them the Lynchburg Werewolves, use the werewolf as the primary logo, and you're good.

But you know what? I'm complaining. And I said I should just be grateful and not complain. I'm not very good at not complaining (especially on this site), but let me try for once. Forget everything I just said. The name is fine, the logo is fine. They got rid of that headache-inducing logo they had before, and I'm happy.

Final Score: 54 points.
Penalties: Alliteration, 5 pts; Script (egregious), 15 pts; Letter, 24 pts; Name, 10 pts.
Bonuses: None.