An all-Jewish softball team, playing in a church league, contacted the brand manager of Hebrew National asking for permission to use the name "the Hebrew Nationals" for their team. They decided to not just allow the team to use the name, but ended up sponsoring the team and designing a new uniform for them...
an excerpt:
UW: Tell me about your team and the league that you play in.
SF: It’s a city league, called the Church League. Almost every team is affiliated in one way or another with a church. There’s a church on every corner here in Albuquerque, so there’s a lot of teams, in five divisions.
Our team, we’re not a super-religious bunch, but we were affiliated for many years with one of the four Jewish synagogues here in Albuquerque. But we recently decided to change the name of our team, and also to end that specific affiliation. Most everyone on our team is Jewish, and maybe involved with the Jewish Community Center, the Jewish Federation, or any number of other Jewish organizations, but we didn’t feel we needed that connection to this one synagogue.
UW: Are the other teams all affiliated with Christian churches, or are there Muslim teams, Buddhist, or whatever?
SF: I wish there was more diversity, but all the other teams are affiliated with Christian churches. At one point a few years back our group had enough players to field a second team, so there were two Jewish teams.
UW: What was your team’s previous name?
SF: We were the Congregation Albert — that’s the name of the synagogue — Lions.
[...]
UW: I think a lot of people would have just chosen the name and not worried about asking the company for permission. I mean, if you had simply gone ahead and done it, they probably would never have heard about it, and probably wouldn’t have cared even if they did hear about it, don’t you think?
SF: Probably. But we have some lawyers on my team, and I was thinking I might as well call them, because I didn’t want to get in any trouble. But I had another motive, which was this: If they were okay with us using the name, would they also be willing to send us a logo that I could put on our jerseys? I liked the font, the colors, the whole thing.
UW: So instead of that, they offered to make a full uniform set for you?
SF: Exactly. Dan Skinner, our contact at Conagra [Hebrew National’s parent company], he said, “I don’t know if it’s okay to use the name — let me check with our legal department.” And then he got back to me and said, “Not only are we fine with it, but we all love the idea and want to sponsor the team.”
UW: And what was your reaction?
SF: I was like, are you kidding me? That sounded great! I said yeah, let’s do that.
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