Lakeland Flying Tigers And The Link to History

The former Lakeland Tigers changed their moniker into Flying Tigers in 2007 after the team took a successful rebranding of the Clearwater Threshers, also a Florida State League team, as an example. But how did the Flying Tigers get their current name? Read on and you will learn.

As written in the prologue, the parent club in Detroit saw the successful rebranding of the Clearwater Phillies into Threshers. They started to think about a new name and dug into history.

They did not have to look for long as history was right below the feet of the (Flying) Tigers. Their ballpark is located right on top of the location where a former airfield was located. This airfield was used to train British and American pilots during WWII. And even though the famous Flying Tigers never trained there, the link was easily made.

The Flying Tigers were a group of US volunteers that joined the Chinese Air Force in 1941. Seven months after the inception of the group, that got the nickname Flying Tigers, it was disbanded and replaced by official US military (of course after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941). The Flying Tigers even had an own logo created by an artist of the Walt Disney Company.

After the airfield was closed in 1953, it was purchased by the Detroit Tigers, who changed the area into their ST facility.

With the name Flying Tigers on their mind, the brass of the Detroit Tigers contacted Brandiose for a couple of (alternate) logos. The logo creating company took a tour around the ballpark and found some touchable history right on the spot. The building that used to be the officers mess, was turned into the cafetaria for Spring Training.

For Brandiose it wasn’t all that hard to see the link between a WWII pilot training facility and a baseball training facility. For the cap logo, they came up with a reference to parent club Detroit Tigers with a pair of wings.

In the course of the design process, a broad variety of logos was created.

And then it comes to the most important part of rebranding, at least for yours truly: the caps. Eventually, two caps were developed. One with some laurels on the lid and one without. It appears that the one with the laurels on the lid is/was the cap that the manager wears/wore. According to Jason Klein of Brandiose, the Flying Tigers are the only minor league club where managers wear a different cap than the players do.

Even though, there is no direct link between Lakeland and the Flying Tigers, the history behind the creation of the new club name is a nice one.