Yolo High Wheelers

8

The people of Davis are very serious about their bicycles.

Okay, before I go further: Davis in this case is Davis, California, where the Yolo High Wheelers play. Davis is located in Yolo County, which sort of explains why the team goes by Yolo but not really, because what's wrong with calling the team Davis? But I've bitched enough times about teams picking something other than they city they play in for their locative and you're probably sick of hearing it, so let's just skip that. The point I'm getting at here is that given that the team is in Davis, naming their team after a bicycle actually makes sense because as I said in the first sentence, the people of Davis are very serious about their bicycles.

What do I mean when I say they're very serious? For starters, the city has bicycle infrastructure to compete with the likes of Denmark and the Netherlands. Plus the city is home to the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame, and the magazine Bicycling once named it the best small town for cycling. (Why it was classified as a "small town" when it has a population of over 60,000 I don't know, but I don't feel like getting into that right now.) It was the first city to be declared a Platinum Level city by the League of American Bicyclists. I don't actually know what that means, but it sounds fairly impressive, and I assume they legitimately earned it because let's face it, if you're going to bribe somebody to create a Platinum status for cities just so you can get it, you're probably going to pick something most Americans care about more than they care about bicycles. But even if it turns out that the city did bribe them, that would still prove how serious they are about their bicycles. The place I live wouldn't bribe the League of American Bicyclists to grant us Platinum status, that's for damn sure. I doubt the idea would ever even occur to them.

Also, it's perhaps worth noting that the city's flag has a bicycle in it. And not just any bicycle: it has a high wheeler in it. In case you haven't figured it out yet (and if you haven't, I'm not sure why), a "high wheeler" is one of those old-timey bicycles where the front wheel was seventy-gazillion times bigger than the back wheel. They're also known as penny-farthings, for reasons which made perfect sense to Nineteenth Century Brits but didn't make a lot of sense to Americans even at the time and today even Brits would probably have trouble telling you where that name came from, particularly since farthings aren't really a thing anymore. In any case, this probably explains why the new team specifically uses a high wheeler in its logo rather than a normal bicycle. (The technical term for a "normal bicycle", I have learned, is the "safety bicycle". This is because they were designed as a safer alternative to high wheelers, which are dangerous as hell. It's apparently real easy to go flying head first over the thing.)

It's also not hard to see why the team decided that of the various bicycle-themed names they could have used, they should go with High Wheelers. First, Bicycles would just be a stupid name, Yolo Bicycles even more so. Penny Farthings just sounds weird as a team name. And of course, High Wheelers sounds vaguely like High Rollers, making the name sound daring in a way one does not normally associate with bicycles...although, again, high wheeler bicycles are in fact dangerous as hell, so many we should associate them with this level of daring.

Does all this mean High Wheelers is a good name? Well, in just about any other sport the answer would be no, but when you're talking about a sport that has a proud history of naming teams after songbirds, the rules are a little different. And of course, in an era where minor league teams have names as ridiculous as Trash Pandas and Sod Poodles, a name like High Wheelers comes across as just being mildly eccentric in a way that quite frankly is kinda refreshing. The logo is similarly low-key. I'm not certain what the wings are doing there, but again, compared to some of the nonsense you get in other logos it seems like a refreshing, minor eccentricity. Also, for reasons I can't quite put into words, I just think it looks neat. Not quite neat enough to earn the Logo bonus, but neat nonetheless. And sometimes, that's all you really need.

Final Score: 8 points.
Penalties: Region, 8 pts.
Bonuses: None.