Traditions & rivalries / Operation Zebra · winter and spring 2018
Groton Tried Twenty Sets of Eyes on One Zebra
For years Groton's teams were the Zebras with no official zebra. In 2018 a committee code-named Operation Zebra fixed that, one eye at a time.
Nobody is entirely sure how Groton School's teams came to be called the Zebras. The likeliest story, according to the designer who later drew one, is the black-and-white striped uniforms of the early teams. Competitors had another nickname for the same uniforms, based on the prison look: the Criminals. Groton kept the Zebras.
For a long time the zebra existed only as a word. Banners, shirts and programs drew it however they liked.
In 2018 that changed. Doug Eymer, a Groton parent who runs a branding firm, had noticed the inconsistencies and contacted the school. The school's chief financial officer had already floated the idea of a new logo. A committee formed with representatives from communications, athletics, alumni relations, admissions and the business office. Eymer's blog says the group was code-named Operation Zebra.
The committee began with adjectives. The zebra should be strong, graceful, dynamic, friendly, simple and dignified. It also had a list of things it should not be. The director of communications, Gail Friedman, told the student paper they did not want the nose to be "fierce, snarling, scary, cartoonish, abstract or too contemporary."
I have tried to imagine a zebra nose that is dignified but not contemporary. I keep picturing it in a waistcoat.
Then the details. "We went through probably twenty sets of eyes on the zebra, trying to get it just right," Friedman said, plus many small revisions such as the way the G connects to the zebra's neck. Eymer wrote that he spent a significant amount of time on the zebra's right eye specifically.
Somewhere in a design studio there is a drawer containing nineteen zebra eyes that were not quite right.
The finished logo arrived after spring break in 2018, when every student got a Zebras T-shirt. The student paper reported that reviews were mixed. One student found it cute. Another praised its fierce gaze. A third thought it looked too scary to represent an academic institution, which was the nose's one job.
At our house the middle one has spent three weeks designing a logo for a band that does not yet have members. He has drawn the eye of the band's animal, a hawk, nine times. I told him a school in Massachusetts went through twenty. He looked relieved, then worried, then asked whether the school had a deadline.
They had spring break. He has the end of seventh grade. The hawk now has both eyes, and the band has a drummer, who is the youngest, holding two spoons.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- The Circle Voice: Zebra Unmasked — Behind Groton’s New Athletic Logo thecirclevoice.org
- Doug Eymer: All Hail the Groton Zebras eymer.com
- Groton: Coed at 50, anniversary logo groton.org