Ottawa’s entry in Canada’s new women’s professional soccer league now has a name and logo, but if you blink, you might miss it.
The Northern Super League franchise based in the nation’s capital unveiled their name — Ottawa Rapid FC — and their logo during an event at TD Place on Thursday, August 15.
The logo features a peregrine falcon — a native species in the Ottawa region and believed to be the fastest animal on earth — outlined in light blue streaking into the middle of an O (for Ottawa). At the top of a roundel is a tulip, a nod to the Canadian Tulip Festival in Ottawa’s Commissioner’s Park each May. “OTTAWA RAPID FC” is spelled in the bottom half of the roundel in a wide, light blue font.
The symmetry of the falcon’s wings is “a nod to the structure and formations on the field,” according to Rapid FC’s press release, while the negative space between represents the three main rivers of the area: the Ottawa, the Rideau and the Gatineau.
The club also unveiled a French variant logo on Thursday, with the words in the bottom of the roundel replaced with “CF RAPIDE OTTAWA”.
The club also released alternate logos with the bird streaking into a light blue circle and “RAPID FC” or “CF RAPIDE” spelled out underneath.
The team worked with marketing agency Critical Mass on the overall branding.
Looking across the landscape, we identified two distinct naming conventions, one (North American) that focused on iconography and mascots: Lions, Tigers, Kraken, Fire, and another that focused on places and team identifiers: United, Sporting, etc. We wanted to find a place between these two, something that gave us some iconography, but wasn’t completely grounded in something outside the game, but also something that was really connected to place and spoke to the emotion of what we were building.
Rapid is a name that came up early in discussions and hung around. We looked at a few different waves of alternatives and kept coming back to this. We had an amazing committee working with us and Critical Mass that included some national team players, some Ottawa locals and some marketing execs who’d been through the process a number of times. The more we talked about it, the more it connected with us. It triggers such a great visceral reaction, the speed, the motion, the progress; but has this double meaning that’s deeply connected to the city and the geology of the Ottawa valley.
— Ottawa Rapid FC press release
The shades of blue in Rapid FC’s color palette “refer to water, sky and the power of nature around us,” according to their press release. They’ll also use neon orange as an accent color, a nod to the Centennial Flame on Parliament hill: “a fountain that doesn’t freeze, a flame that never dies, a symbol of our resilience that gives back to the community.”
Rapid FC joins the Halifax Tides, AFC Toronto and Calgary Wild FC as clubs that have unveiled identities ahead of the NSL’s April 2025 launch. The league will also have teams in Montréal and Vancouver. The NSL itself announced its name and logo in May 2024.
