The Summit League is home to some of the most unique mascots in college athletics. The Golden Grizzlies regularly compete against Leathernecks, Mastodons, Kangaroos and Jackrabbits in conference battles.

However, uncommon costumed characters on the sideline do little to help the perception of a school on a national scale. In order to increase the brand awareness of the league as a whole, the Summit League has decided to rename three of its member institutions.

Beginning this school year, Oakland will no longer face off against IPFW, UMKC, or UNO. Instead, those universities’ sports programs will be officially known as Fort Wayne, Kansas City and Omaha.

Scott MacDonald, assistant athletics director  for athletic communications at OU, is pleased with the changes, believing the rebranding efforts will increase valuable exposure to the conference.

“The Summit League is trying to establish a new identity that provides increased notoriety,” MacDonald said. “By changing these three school names to the city they are located in, it provides more name recognition for fans across the country.”

Fans in the O’rena may not even notice the change, as the Mastodons’ jerseys will still bear IPFW across the front, but a fan sitting at home in front of a television will now see a familiar city crawl across a ticker as opposed to a confusing acronym.

While the change is meant to make teams more recognizable, officials in Fort Wayne are not rushing to paint over the sign reading “Indiana-Purdue at Fort Wayne” anytime soon. The new moniker is strictly for athletics, not the overall university.

“This is a regional branding initiative on the part of the League,” said Tommy Bell, Fort Wayne athletic director. “We are not changing our uniforms, our name, or anything else. We’re trying it for a year and we’ll see if there is any push back.”

Conference newcomer, the University of Nebraska-Omaha, has prepared for its first year of play in the Summit League with a complete overhaul of logos and branding.

The program used to go by ‘UNO’, often mistaken for the University of New Orleans. Now, the Mavericks have a new “O” logo, focusing on the Omaha area as the main billing point.

Omaha Director of Communications Dave Ahlers said the changes made sense on a broader scale.

“In this day and age, shorter seems to be better,” Ahlers said. “For the alumni who live in the area, we will always be UNO, but from a national perspective it made more sense.”

These changes reflect similar campaigns done at schools such as University of North Carolina at Charlotte, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.

The last remaining tongue-twister in the Summit League is IUPUI, who will still be known by a collection of vowels, at least for this season. Officials are wary of simply going by “Indianapolis”, as this could confuse fans with the University of Indianapolis.

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Contact Senior Reporter Tim Pontzer via email at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter 

@timothy_pontzer