Lancaster Stormers

51

I feel like this team had a pretty good thing going and then screwed it all up.

When the team debuted in 2005, they were called the Lancaster Barnstormers. That name worked on a couple of levels: the barn part was a reference to the heavy concentration of Amish people in the area, and the whole name was a reference to the old practice of "barnstorming" teams that would travel from place to place and play whatever local team was willing to play them, and maybe also to another meaning of barnstorming, which is a term dating to the early days of airplanes and means using said planes to perform aerial stunts. (If you're wondering why this was called "barnstorming" it's because the pilots usually flew from one rural area to another to put on shows; if you're wondering why travelling teams are called "barnstorming teams" it's because the teams also often travelled from one rural area to another). In my opinion, it was a pretty clever name.

Last year, they decided it was time to update the name. So what did they do? They got rid of the barn part and changed their name to simply be the Lancaster Stormers.

This is a mistake on a few levels. First, in erasing the first four letters they also erased the local correction; the name "Stormers" could apply to a team anywhere that has storms, which last I checked is basically everywhere except for deserts.* Then they came up with a logo that has almost nothing to do with the storms. Yes, there's a lightning bolt of sorts on the cow's face, but the fact remains that the logo is a cow's face. For a team called the Stormers. Cow. Storm. No.

If you ask the team, the fans were calling the team the Stormers anyway, so it wasn't really a name change, and the cow is a tie-in with the area. I'm calling bullshit on both points in a big, bad way.

Not a name change? Your. Name. Is. Different. That's what's known as a "name change" in the English language.

As for the cow tying in to the local area, cows are only slightly less ubiquitous than storms. Cows tie into most rural areas, and even some major cities (think Chicago or Kansas City, for example). Also, logos aren't supposed to tie in to the local area. They're supposed to tie in to the team name. If the team name ties in to the local area, great, the logo can too. As noted above, the name does not tie in to the local area anymore. If you're going to call your team the Stormers, maybe put a storm into the logo. Or at least some kind of weather reference.

Instead, we get a cow.

The cow, incidentally, doesn't even have a name related to storms. His name is Cylo. That's obviously a homophone of silo — why he isn't simply named Silo in the first place, I don't know. In any case, the name is obviously a reference to the part of the team name the team just got rid of. Presumably the mascot had that name back when the team was still the Barnstormers, but if you're going to rebrand, shouldn't you rebrand everything? And if you're going to keep using a bunch of stuff that only makes sense in the context of the name you abandoned, why did you even change it?

*

And really, they happen in deserts, too. First of all, you have sandstorms. Second, while it doesn't rain much in deserts, when rain does happen it's often a doozy. A place in the desert might go three or four years with no rain at all, and then get several inches of rain in a single day, maybe even a single hour.

Final Score: 51 points.
Penalties: Irrelevance, 39 pts; Logo, 12 pts.
Bonuses: None.