SPRINGFIELD, Ky.
St. Catharine College has a new athletic logo designed to represent the school and its athletic team mascot — a Patriot.
According to a press release from the school, the new Patriot logo was developed after nearly two years of discussion, planning and designing.
“It was a long road to reach this point, but we’re there and I think we have a really exciting logo that the teams and fans can rally behind and support,” said Tom Bystrek, SCC’s assistant athletic director and sports information director.
“The committee worked with a company out of Louisville to come up with new concept of a Patriot logo,” Bystrek said. “The only criteria we had to work with was the fact we had to remain the Patriots and the colors were to remain purple and gold. When you normally think of a Patriot, you think of red, white and blue. But we had to stick to our colors.
“The design company offered several concepts and some of them were good and some were pretty bad,” he said. “We narrowed our choices down to a few but nothing really stood out to have some pop to it. The committee agreed on one particular design to go with, but it was still lacking. To his credit, our director of communications, Jim Earls, who is also the chair of the marketing committee, did some work to refine the logo and his design is the one we’re using today.”
“It was a group effort,” said Earls. “The committee as a whole — Dr. Harry Nickens, Mike Doig, Amy Bland, Paul Presta, Ming Li, Sister Barbara Rapp, student representative Paige Hassman, myself and Sister Angie Shaughnessy, who handled the legal side of the logo — worked diligently to arrive at a logo that we can be proud of. Of course, we wanted buy-in from the Dominican Sisters of Peace, so Sister Angie and I presented it to them over lunch at the motherhouse and the response was overwhelmingly positive.”
The three elements of the logo replace ones that were not official and were borrowed from other teams. The new logo consists of a Patriot head logo, new text and a stand-alone “SC” design.
“We were using the interlocking SC design for a while but that concept is trademarked by the University of Southern California,” Bystrek said. “We had discussions with them and they allowed us to eventually phase out our use of that design. With this new design, we have something that is uniquely St. Catharine and something we own the rights to.”
“Our reasoning behind using SC and not SCC is that, from a marketing standpoint, we’re looking ahead when we eventually become a university,” Earls added. “Plus, when a lot of people see those two C’s, they immediately think in terms of community college, and we are definitely not that anymore.”
Several of the athletic teams have already implemented the new logo into their wardrobe, including track and field, soccer and volleyball. There are also plans to have the new Patriot logo available on items in the Spirit Shoppe soon.
“This is an important step for the St. Catharine because most people know colleges from their team logos,” Bystrek said. “When you think of the University of Louisville, you think of the Cardinals, when you think of UK, you think of the Wildcats. When people see the Patriot logo, we want that to be instantly identifiable as St. Catharine.”
“Keep in mind that this is the logo for athletics and they are the primary users,” Earls said. “There will be some use of it in advertising and merchandise, but this is not replacing the college’s current shield logo for official business.”
