Rim Rattlerz

Editor’s note: The team featured in today’s post isn’t technically defunct. Like the original Cleveland Browns and Charlotte Hornets, it has moved cities and reincarnated after two decades.

My first design assignment came in the eighth grade. Our traveling team basketball coach wanted a name and logo for his club that would separate it from the school. Prior to that, we borrowed Hemingford High School’s Bobcat mascot. There were politics involved in the decision and frankly we were tired of The Hemingford Ledger referring to us as “Bob Kittens.”

Brandon Vogel and I sat in the back of the bus on a trip home from a track meet and brainstormed.

We came up with two ideas and two color schemes. The first was “The Snipers,” something that would have been squashed by today’s political correctness the moment that it was proposed. Twenty-five years ago, we could have gotten away with it. The logo was simple – a Jumpman silhouette caught in the sights of a rifle. It was Air Jordan meets Public Enemy.

The second idea was the “Rim Rattlerz.” This was the era when And 1 was producing braggadocios tee-shirts proclaiming basketball skills that few possessed. No, a bunch of white kids from western Nebraska couldn’t dunk and certainly couldn’t rattle rims. But we could wear shirts that said we did.

At the time, I don’t believe I knew what the Gadsden flag was, or that it existed. But the Rim Rattlerz logo certainly shared similarities with a crude rattlesnake coiled around a basketball. Actually it was a reverse coil, where the snake tapered toward the bottom taking the shape of a hoop. The snake, with jaws open and tongue wagging as if he were about to strike, actually looked more like it was smiling.

As we brainstormed, I drew sketches in a college ruled notebook, not an easy task as the bus jostled over every crack on the highway. Brandon and I decided on two classic color schemes that would work with either design – black and yellow or royal and red. When I got home, I refined the sketches and took them to the team picnic for a player vote. Royal and red Rim Rattlerz narrowly won by process of alliteration.

I have fond memories of those days. When I began coaching my son’s fourth grade basketball team, I wanted to pay tribute to my youth team, if not selfishly trying to recapture those moments. As I ordered uniforms, I dug out my old jersey with the smiling snake. I decided to come up with a more modern design so I sketched it, refined and colored it in Photoshop and created a Rim Rattlerz logo for the next generation. It’s fiercer, more realistic, more detailed and has brighter colors. Not to brag, but if it were the logo of an NBA team, they could certainly do worse (see the Pelicans).

However, in its rookie season with the rattler blazoned on the scrawny chests of 10-year-olds , I realized that I miss the old smiling snake. Maybe I’m just being sentimental. I guess that’s the whole point of this blog. But the old rattler had character.

Public Enemy’s Chuck D recently tweeted out a photo of the design process for the group’s iconic logo. “1986 the construction of the logo, magic markers – white out – copy machine – Exacto knife . No computer or Photoshop.”  I probably doodled that PE logo 1,000 times on book covers and notebooks.

Technology is terrific, but it levels the playing field. For instance, with a few tweaks, Photoshop can make a relatively average photographer look pretty good. Conversely, not all artists are created equal when given a pencil.

Looking back, Brandon and I were kind of like a garage band, brainstorming names and using primitive tools to transform our ideas into a visual. We also won a lot of basketball games with that visual displayed on our jerseys, adding to my fondness for it. Perhaps the smiling snake will make a comeback next year.