In the wake of the rebranding to Cal State Long Beach, the school’s athletic department followed suit this week, unveiling a new visual identity including tweaked fonts, logos and work marks that athletes will don in competition.
The athletic department’s new moniker will be “Beach” (dropping the “The”) with the nickname for all sports teams excluding the baseball team (The Dirtbags) remaining the 49ers.
The intertwined LB monogram will still be a staple of the school’s athletics teams with minor changes to keep the logo fresh. Despite the changes also being applied to the baseball uniforms script and monogram, the Dirtbags name will remain unchanged.
In a statement on the school’s athletics website, Director of Athletics Vic Cegles said that maintaining the traditional logo was important to both the university and its sponsors, “but at the same time, we have to keep moving the program forward in such a way that we can continue to attract outstanding student athletes to our program which was the key factor in prompting these improvements.”
The changes made to the logos are minor and not immediately noticeable but the lines were made thicker, a space in the middle portion of the B of the original version filled in and the secondary logo changed from “The Beach” to the more simplified “Beach”.
“While we understand that these changes may take time to take hold, their impact will ultimately be felt nationwide,” Assistant Athletics Director for Media Relations Roger Kirk said on the school’s athletic website. “The script, logos and direction from these changes will help continue to grow the unique impact that Long Beach State has on collegiate athletics.”
Additionally, the official website and other social media platforms will be updated to mirror the changes in branding to the team uniforms. The school’s athletic program’s development arm, 49er Athletic Club, will be rebranded to Beach Athletic Club and with the help of an alumni donation, the hardwood basketball court inside Walter Pyramid will have tweaks made to reflect the new visual identity of the school. The floor, which was redone in 2010 and heralded as one of the best floors in the nation, will have the palm tree silhouettes rearranged to face a broadcast position, the three-point lines stained instead of painted and Walter Pyramid’s logos will be added to the layout.
All changes to the athletics department were made in partnership with Andy Hoang who earlier this year announced the rebranding of the school as a whole from California State University Long Beach to Long Beach State University. Hoang said the move was made to create a united brand to help establish a culture indicative of the success of the university.
“We can’t create a vision if we have multiple identities,” Hoang said last month. “And in our research, we’ve discovered a few things: CSULB is viewed as one of many CSUs, it’s a commuter school, it’s a research underdog, and there’s a lack of alumni pride. Many of the people we interviewed were apologetic about graduating from a CSU but not apologetic about Long Beach—a schism. We can’t have apologetic alumni because our future depends on alumni beaming with pride.”