As someone who was recently forced to rewatch all three High School Musicals back-to-back, I was exceedingly surprised to learn the Wildcat branding on University of Edinburgh Sports merchandise wasn’t an absurd movie-invoked dream I vaguely remembered. The University of Edinburgh has announced a Sports Union-wide rebrand, including 70 different sports and 10,000 student-athletes. We are now: The Edinburgh Wildcats.
What this actually entails, according to the statement released by the university’s Director of Sport, is the creation of a “space in which to champion the incredible talent that lies within current students and alumni who have come through our doors.” Well, that and an extortionate Wildcat-Lululemon collab.
If this pivot seems exceedingly American to you, that is precisely because it is. The Wildcats rebrand is an implementation of an American model which the university claims is the first of its kind in the UK. The Herald reports it is in fact the second, with the GCU Wolves of Glasgow Caledonian University narrowly beating us to the punch in 2017.
The American model of marketing college sports is not inherently something to sneer at. I have watched multiple friends return from years abroad in the US with an unexplainable, deep, emotional attachment and pride to their host universities that they never once felt for the University of Edinburgh. This stems from the community atmosphere created by College Basketball or American Football teams. Over the course of a year, they become Tar Heels, Longhorns or Tigers.
The question I pose here then is not whether students in the UK are susceptible to this form of marketing, but instead whether the choice of so abruptly declaring ourselves “the Wildcats” isn’t self-sabotage from the outset. Perhaps a university wide poll would have helped? It is a little difficult to take the moniker seriously when most of us grew up associating “Go Wildcats” with a teen Disney movie.
My final question is whether this is a ploy to attract more international students and increase profits at the expense of current student athletes. Sports at the University of Edinburgh are already inaccessible to a whole host of students, who are asked to shell out over £400 in some cases for gym memberships, club memberships, new kit, and other hidden fees. Encouraging 10,000 students to buy Wildcat-branded merch for the sake of community, when they’re already buried by the cost of access to these extracurriculars, feels inappropriate.
Whether the rebrand is effectively rolled out and really impacts how people feel about this university or the sporting community within it, remains to be seen. There may be a way to synthesise the American model with UK university culture; I’m intrigued to see what methods they use to create such a utopian community of sportspersons.
Image by Cordelia Murray-Brown for The Student.
