Lake Howell High School is changing their logo for the 2017/2018 school year due to a copyright violation.
The school’s current logo, a side view of a blue hawk head, is pictured below:
This logo will be changed to the new logo, an “LH” in the center of two wings, as pictured below:
This new logo will replace the hawk head seen on shirts, murals, scoreboards, and more.
InFlight was able to talk to Mr. Betsinger, who coaches the boys’ JV and Varsity soccer teams, and get his thoughts on the change.
On the initial difficulties of the change: Well, I think that it’s a bit ludicrous. I get the concept and the idea of the rule of law and copying. I get it. To have someone really stick their nose out and come after Lake Howell High School is very frustrating to me. I don’t know if they’ve made it personal or not, but I almost feel like, as a teacher here at Lake Howell, that they have because I can right now, probably of the top of my head, name four, five, six, seven, ten high schools that I know for a fact are doing the exact same thing that we are, and they’re not being raked over coals or having their whole season and everything flip-flopped. I’m having to by almost $6,000 worth of new gear because of the old gear having the symbols on it, so this is no joke. Lake Brantley has the Patriots, Bishop Moore has Georgia Tech (a hornet), Masters Academy has the Philadelphia Eagle. I could probably keep going down the list of teams that have mascots. Off the top of my head, I just know that they’re doing the same thing that we have done. Now ultimately, it is wrong. It’s copying. It’s plagiarism, so it is the right thing to do, ultimately. Could it have been handled differently? Yeah. I would’ve loved to see it handled differently. It’s a bit frustrating, something that we’ll deal with, and it’s change, and we’ll just deal with it.
On the effect it has on the soccer team: I’ve scrapped 3 sets of jerseys, including the JV ones because those were old and they had graphics on them. To be honest, it might be a little more than that. It could be $7,000 to $8,000 worth of cloth. It’s going to be headache. We’re going to have to fundraise and replenish that money. It’s nice to have new stuff, but I wasn’t planning on having new stuff. We also can’t recycle the old ones and pass them down. I was not expecting that one bit.
On his optimism for the future: The other side of the coin is that I think it’s exciting for us as a student body. The wings are really getting promoted now, that seems to be an emblem that’s popping out. I’m really starting to like that. The bad side of the idea is also the fun side of it, I’m going to be flat out honest. I loved talking about it with you and thinking about it. It’s fun to buy the new jerseys. It’s not fun to fundraise, but it is kind of neat to start with something new. I’ve been here 22 years, and we’ve probably had about six or seven mascots running around this campus so it’s going to be great to finally get one locked down. This is it, it ain’t gonna change. We didn’t cheat. We didn’t plagiarize. It’s ours. It’s our trademark and we bank off of it. We just try to make money off of it. Make it proud. That’s excellent. Those are my ideas.
By: Miguel Santiago
