Behind the Design: GOAT Team Logo

A group of old GOAT players and friends-of-the-herd were surprised this Thanksgiving with a sweet note from the designer behind the mysterious GOAT team mascot, Pary Bell. VC caught up with Pary to hear the story behind one of ultimate's most recognizable logos.

VC: The team name GOAT has always has some mystery around it. Greatest Of All Time, Greater Ottawa And Toronto… are you able to actually enlighten us to the meaning of “GOAT”?

Pary Bell: It is not for me to reveal the secrets to how the small group of 5 of us (me, John “Boogs” Hollins, Andrew Edgell, Geoff Simonet, and Andrew Ochterlony) who formed the team came to name the team GOAT, but I will say it was not my favorite name for the team... but I was committed to work with it! So the mystery continues!!!

VC: What was the original inspiration for the logo? Was it intended to throw non-team members off the scent of the real meaning of the team name?

PB: Once we decided on the team name, I started noodling ideas around how to create a fun logo would capture the commitment we all made to the team while also highlighted the playfulness we all had back then. I quite loved the Furious George logo and the Sockeye logo at the time and wanted to give us a similar character to the name of the team.

VC: What impression did you want to logo to give off? The eyebrows are furrowed in a way that makes the goat look fierce, but there’s also a playfulness in the final version of the logo. 

PB: You are bang on here – I wanted to show that we were going to be a team to be reckoned with (which was a prophecy that came to be) but that we were also prone to have a lot of fun and did not take ourselves too seriously. You can see in some of my sketches that I was really trying to balance off both elements and I think I accomplished it in the final version.

VC: We found some pretty epic old school GOAT team jersey designs, dating back to the camo sublimated side panels from 2005. Actually, GOAT can be credited with the first sublimated big wrap-around side logo in 2009 or 2010, or maybe even earlier? That jersey was an iconic one for VC and ultimate in general – everybody wanted a side print logo for years… so much so that we actually changed our jersey pattern to be only one side panel to allow for it.

PB: How cool is it that your design helped create a far reaching trend in ultimate jersey designs?

First off – I LOVED my camo jerseys. They were awesome.

I would step further back and mention our powder blue jerseys that we won our first National Championship in. It is when we began to challenge the status quo. The camo ones followed that followed by the innovation with the big wrap, but it all started with the desire to be different

A revolution in ultimate jersey design... the side logo hits ultimate fields everywhere...

The artist behind GOAT's big side logo design was VC's good friend, Anatoly "Told" Vasilyev. "I'm not 100% how exactly I came up with the idea of the wrap around logo," Toly says when we asked him about his inspiration. "I think my thinking process started after attending my first Nationals in Sarasota. I was like a kid at a toy store, walking around those huge polo fields surrounded by some of the best ultimate the world had to offer. But the frustrating part was that you couldn't tell what teams were playing where. Everybody had the same type of jerseys with small logos or teamnames and black shorts. None of the teams stood out using creative design, colors, fit or whatever. I love GOAT logo, which in my opinion reflects well the team personality and i thought it would be a great idea to make it more visible & recognisable. Even though I believe now it's been overused, but back then we set a really cool trend that looked good on so many other teams for years!"

VC: Do you know if this goat likes monkeys?

PB: I can say that the original group that formed GOAT was inspired what they had done on the west coast, and we set forth a roadmap to get Ultimate in the East to be just as competitive or more. This was why the formation of Grand Trunk and ROY were so important in our early days. We would not spank the Monkey in the first year, but we believed we had a plan that would get us there. And you know how things rolled out!

Support The Herd by sporting GOAT gear, available in the VC online store here.