Right as Reign: The Story Behind the Ontario Reign

When you think of Ontario and hockey, the first thing that leaps to mind is probably not southern California’s Inland Empire. But that’s where you’ll find the minor league Ontario Reign, an affiliate of the nearby LA Kings. The Reign play in the double-A ECHL, which used to stand for East Coast Hockey League, but since the league has assimilated teams across North America’s time zones (including Alaska), now it’s just a weird all-caps word instead of an acronym.

The Reign franchise debuted in 1993 as the Huntington Blizzard in West Virginia, where they played until 2000. After not playing for three seasons, they were reborn as the Texas Wildcatters in 2003, and in 2008 moved to Ontario (the city in California with a population of 167,000—not the Canadian province of nearly 13 million people).

According to Justin Kemp, team president and 2012 ECHL Executive of the Year, there are two reasons for the team’s name. “For one, being an affiliate of the LA Kings, and their triple-A affiliate being the Manchester Monarchs, Reign carries on that regal theme.” And two, “the area that we play in here, the region is known as the Inland Empire, so it’s essentially reigning over the empire.”

While the Reign’s name is consistent with their parent club’s royal theme, they wanted to stake a claim to a unique identity. “The Kings and the Monarchs both had crowns, so I didn’t really want to go with the same thing,” Kemp said. “We went with the shield look, and you know, the dragon was something that was fierce.”

Both the shield and the dragon from the primary logo are reflected in the team’s two mascots, Blaze the Dragon and the Dark Knight. Kemp explains, “even though the Dark Knight technically doesn’t carry a shield anymore, this logo is essentially supposed to be this shield that he carries.”

I asked Kemp if there was a relationship between the Reign’s Dark Knight and another Dark Knight from 2008, and he responded with a laugh, “Ours came out before that movie.”

The shield in the logo references royalty, but to me, it creates an air of sophistication, in part because it reminds me of European soccer logos. While that connection was not intentional, the team made an early and specific decision to take a serious approach to their identity.

“It was important to us to have something that wasn’t gimmicky, that wasn’t cartoonish, that conveyed a strong message and a strong identity,” Kemp said. “The way we run our entire operation, we run it just like a major league team, even though we’re in a minor league. We don’t talk about ourselves like that, we don’t treat ourselves like that. Every single aspect of our business is just meant to be a smaller scale of what the NHL is.”

When the team debuted, they announced their name before they unveiled a logo, so fan reaction came in stages. “The unveiling of the name was met with mixed reaction,” Kemp said. “Any time you hear a team name for the very first time, that’s likely to happen. Some people didn’t like that it wasn’t plural, some people didn’t know exactly what it meant.”

But the visual identity turned the tide of public opinion. “It took a little bit, but when they saw the logo for the first time, I think it brought it all together,” Kemp said. “It’s hard not to like the logo…. I think it’s one when they saw it they said, ‘Okay, this isn’t gimmicky, this isn’t goofy, this is something that we can be proud of.'”

The team’s secondary logo appears as a shoulder patch on the uniform, and is featured on their third jersey. “It has the dragon head and the wings, and kind of comes around in a circle that creates an O, which is technically supposed to stand for Ontario,” Kemp said.

The team’s blue and orange were chosen in part for their strong contrast, but also because blue is Kemp’s favorite color, and “orange is just a nice accent color that pops.”

Shortly after the Reign debuted, their logo received some unexpected early recognition. In September 2008, Hockey News online held a logo contest in which the then-brand new Reign reached final four, along with the Montreal Canadiens, Detroit Red Wings, and the Quebec League’s Rimouski Oceanic. “It was a lot better than we anticipated doing,” Kemp said, “so we were proud of that.”

In a league where some teams embrace the minor league cartoon as their identity (see the Missouri Mavericks, Orlando Solar Bears, and Toledo Walleye), the Reign have gone a more serious route. While some other teams evoke SpongeBob Squarepants, the Reign evoke Game of Thrones (with less nudity, though probably a comparable amount of gore). With a look that harkens back to another era and a serious approach to their identity, it feels like the Reign have been around a lot longer than they actually have.