The town of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, sits at the southern tip of Lake Winnebago—its name, translated from French, means “bottom of the lake.” (Lake Winnebago, I was sad to realize as I started writing this article, is not to be confused with New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee, where the movie What About Bob took place).
The idyllic setting plays host to boating, swimming, fishing, and all of the other recreational activities you would associate with the largest lake located entirely within the state of Wisconsin. It is also home to a creature that locals know well, but might not entirely familiar to people on other parts of the continent—the dock spider.
I was not familiar with the term dock spider, so I had to look it up. An article on the website Cottage Life, offers this as one of its 10 reasons that we should celebrate dock spiders instead of being squeamish about them: “They don’t spin webs to catch their prey. Instead, they stalk their victims, using two large fangs to inject them with venom, paralyzing them.”
So that’s good.
When Brandiose partners Jason Klein and Casey White visited Fond du Lac to work with the town’s new team in the collegiate summer level Northwoods League, they did not expect to be thinking about spiders.
“We went to Wisconsin, first time in Wisconsin, got to tour a dairy farm, which was incredible, ate cheese curds. We went all in,” Klein said. “Early on, we had anticipated a dairy name, because there wasn’t really any dairy brands out there in minor league sports. We thought we could really do a lot with dairy.”
There was one evocative dairy-themed name that had potential, but made people nervous, even in today’s wackadoodle world of minor league baseball branding.
“The name that we really liked, and everyone was on the fence, was the Udder Tuggers,” Klein said. “Everybody who heard it thought, I love that name. It sounds like there’s something wrong with it, but no one could really land on what was offensive about, because everything you think is offensive about it is not.”
Still, while no one could quite put their finger on why Udder Tuggers made people squeamish, the name did not make the final cut. Brandiose had been brought in to be part of the naming process, but the final choice was something they had never heard of before visiting Wisconsin.
“We didn’t grow up with dock spiders in San Diego, where we live,” Klein said. “We started doing research. The staff told us about the lake…. They talked about these relentless, evil spiders.”
Dock spiders as a species (actually, it’s a common name for a handful of species) have something of a public relations problem. (As a Richmond Spider myself, I can attest that not everyone loves arachnids as sports mascots.) But the team had fully bought in and was ready to run with the idea.
“One of the things that is important to us is that the staff has to love the idea,” Klein said. “The staff has to be able to go, Oh, we could name the kids’ club this, and we could name the team store this. The staff said at some point, we’re more emotionally invested in Dock Spiders.”
For the uninitiated, like me, I asked Klein just what a dock spider is.
“They’re these big, fuzzy spiders,” he said. “It’s pretty straight forward. They live under docks. They’re kind of nasty, and they’re kind of furry.”
The Dock Spiders name won the name-the-team contest, beating out other finalists Barn Owls, Lake Flies, Pipsqueaks, and Shantymen, and since its debut this season, has garnered a fair amount of attention, even competing against affiliated minor league clubs like the Binghamton Rumble Ponies, Florida Fire Frogs, and New Orleans Baby Cakes. The battle to get brands noticed has trickled all the way down to collegiate summer level ball, and the Dock Spiders are the natural outcome of that process.
