When Northwood’s varsity boys tennis team stepped onto the court on May 24, 2021, they were suddenly faced with a doppelganger: Claremont High School from Los Angeles County, with the same logo as ours emblazoned across their shirts.
Which came first, the blue or the red? Behind this lighthearted mutual confusion lay not a simple coincidence, but a web of wolf logos spanning high schools across the state—one that, after 10 months of emails, interviews and letters, I have managed to unravel.
The story of Northwood’s logo begins with graphics teacher Pat Quigley, who, while working at Lakeside Middle School in 1998, was approached by Northwood’s first principal, Tony Ferruzzo, to design graphics for the school. Ferruzzo wanted to avoid the aggressive scowling in most wolf logos, leading to Quigley sketching the school’s first “Howling Wolf” logo. The next year, it was all over the newly opened campus—on official documents, the gym’s interior and sports gear.
Today, however, his logo has almost disappeared—save for a small emblem in the gym next to the Alma Mater and select school merchandise—replaced by the modern, simplified and scowling “Profile Wolf.” Quigley was never told why.
“I was a little bit bummed about that,” Quigley said. “Because here I am, I created the original. At least ask me, ‘Hey, we’re thinking about modifying it, changing it. New look.’ ‘Sure, I’ll try my hand at another one.’ But it just started to appear out of nowhere. … I understand the change, it was just, it would’ve been nice to have been asked to see if I could do it.”
The logo came to Northwood through one of our first football coaches, Rick Curtis. He said that he repurposed Claremont’s logo while looking for a new helmet decal similar to that of the Kansas State University Wildcats in the 2002-03 school year.
“Pat’s version was beautiful and very detailed,” Curtis said in an email. “However, the feedback that I was receiving was that when we put it on a decal on a helmet (or a polo for that matter) it was difficult to determine exactly what it was from a distance and with the N added, you had to make it very big to get the whole effect.”
As it was slowly accepted by most of Northwood’s other athletic teams throughout the 2000s, administration was forced to come to a decision.
“For several years, we had dueling logos,” principal Eric Keith said in an e-mail., “Uuntil maybe 2010 (approximately), we finally decided to fully commit to the vectorized ‘Profile Wolf.’ You’ll still see the Howling Wolf on the occasional document, but over the past decade or so, we’ve tried to be consistent in our branding.”
So where did Claremont get the Profile Wolf? To answer this, I contacted Claremont’s librarian, Jim Munsey.
When Munsey started at Claremont in the spring of 1988, the school’s primary logo was a three-headed wolf drawn by an English teacher’s son earlier that decade. Like Northwood’s Howling Wolf, the Claremont logo was also underutilized when it came to athletics.
“It was just Claremont or Wolfpack on all jerseys, or a block C and script Pack on the football helmets,” Munsey said in an email.
In 2002, Munsey, then the school’s baseball coach, noticed this problem and started using the logo of his alma mater, Shasta High School, on his team’s baseball caps. With the help of assistant football coach Milo Epling, the logo was adopted by Claremont’s football team in 2003, and eventually went schoolwide.
When Munsey graduated from Shasta in 1987, their logo was still a forward-facing brown wolf. The purple Profile Wolf that Munsey took inspiration from was implemented in 2001, at the request of then-principal Milan Woollard.
“Woollard wanted a more modern collegiate looking mascot,” Amy Eiszele, a Shasta alum and current social science teacher and yearbook adviser, said in an email. “Our previous mascot was more cartoonish, that is why he went with a more modern wolf head!”
I was unable to reach Woollard himself for comment, but did contact Woollard’s former colleague and Shasta’s current principal, Heath Bunton, who told me the logo was first used by soccer coach Mike Silva before being adopted by administration.
“The coach said it was from the same company that made the Kansas State logo,” Bunton said in an email. “We contacted the company and paid them to use it. The company’s name is Sandy Inc.”
Sandy, Inc., now a retail display company in Kansas City, Mo., was founded as an advertising agency in 1952 by marketing consultant Hal Sandy. Six years earlier, Sandy designed the modern University of Kansas logo, known as the “smiling Jayhawk.” Why Silva chose this agency for their uniforms, and why a Sandy, Inc. designer based the Profile Wolf on the logo of K-State, KU’s sworn rivals, remains a mystery—but it is nonetheless likely where the Profile Wolf originated.
The K-State Wildcats logo, known as the Powercat, indeed shows direct similarities with the Profile Wolf, including the shape of the mouth—though less stretched—and the two lines curving from it. It was designed by artist Tom Bookwalter in 1989 while he was teaching an art class part-time at K-State as part of head football coach Bill Snyder’s push to revitalize his team.
So why did Shasta, Claremont and Northwood all adopt the Profile Wolf within a span of three years? Perhaps it was the spirit of renewal that came with the new millennium, along with the new ease with which logos could be taken from the Internet. I’ve found more than a dozen other high schools across the United States that now also have the Profile Wolf.
Though the differences are probably sufficient to prevent K-State from cracking down on the Profile Wolf as other colleges have on high schools with lookalike logos, should Northwood ever be in the market for another new look, Quigley said that he’d still be open to the challenge.
“I’m on my last year, two years here anyway, so it’d be nice to set one last mark on the school,” Quigley said. “As long as there’s one, at least, of my Howling Wolf around here, and they stay that way, that’s cool with me too.”
