After 15 years, Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) is getting a facelift.
On October 20, CIS announced a rebranding of the organization, now called U Sports — with one title, “instantly recognizable and identical in both French and English”.
“This is a landmark day for us. Effective today, we are U Sports,” Graham Brown, the CEO of U Sports said in a press release. “This is an important step towards a total transformation of our organization which started almost a year ago.”
“Although the mission and the passion remain the same, the new brand will shine the spotlight on our dedicated student-athletes at our 56 universities across the country.”
Established in 1906 as the central league for Ontario and Quebec university sports, the Canadian Interuniversity Athletic Union (CIAU) became the national representative for leagues across the country in 1961. In 2001, the league rebranded as the CIS (or SIC in French).
Hulse & Durrell, a design firm based in Vancouver that has developed brands like Equestrian Canada, Curling Canada and Team Canada athletics, developed the rebranding of U Sports.
The new U Sports website will launch in 2017, but rebranding initiatives will be scheduled along the way. For example, the Women’s Hockey CIS National Championships that Queen’s is hosting has been re-branded to the 2017 U Sports Championship.
“The strength of our institutions of higher learning in some way or another should be university sport,” Brown said in an interview with Sportsnet last year. “We have an opportunity that to this point they haven’t maximized. We have an opportunity to grow our corporate partners and to grow our fan base.”
U Sports may be that opportunity as it will focus on keeping up in the “fast-changing digital era.”
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