NOTE: This story has been updated with additional reporting.
As Commissioner Travis Tellitocci and the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference hosted the NCAA Tournament in Buffalo back in March, he kept hearing one question from others in the college athletics space. He even said he heard it from competing coaches.
What would the MAAC’s new name be?
And I’ve lived this as well. Since November, when the MAAC announced this project, and later, February, when Mid-Major Madness reported on an initial timeline thanks to an exclusive interview with Tellitocci, he and I have been followed by that question.
What logo would the 13 schools – Canisius, Fairfield, Iona, Manhattan, Marist, Merrimack, Mount St. Mary’s, Niagara, Quinnipiac, Rider, Sacred Heart, Saint Peter’s, and Siena – have on their uniforms?
On Thursday, we finally got our answer — officially. The league will be called The Metro Conference, starting on July 1.
It’s no secret that the MAAC wanted to change its name to avoid confusion with the Mid-American Conference.
“As we’ve gone through the process,” Tellitocci told Mid-Major Madness in February. “Something that somebody said that I thought was really good, is if you have a 30-second elevator pitch to promote the MAAC, you’re spending the first 15 seconds talking about who we’re not as opposed to who we are.”
He hopes that the new name will untether the conference from its midwestern neighbor.
“The goal of this project was to establish a bold and clear identity that eliminated longstanding confusion surrounding the Conference’s name,” Tellitocci said in a release. “Throughout this process, we wanted to create a brand that better positions the Conference for the future while still honoring the tradition and foundation that have defined this league for the past 45 years. We are excited about this next chapter and the future of the Metro Conference.”
The initiative was chaired by Mount St. Mary’s president Dr. Gerard Joyce, but involved representatives from all 13 schools, including student athletes, coaches, administrators, and even national media members, as reported in February.
Fanta also sat down with Tellitocci — with the commissioner zooming in from this week’s league meetings in upstate New York — to discuss the name change in an interview for the conference website and social.
Tellitocci told Fanta that the eventual pick was one of four finalists for the name after starting with “a large pool of names.”
“As we went through the testing process with our various groups,” Tellitocci said. “Metro consistently scored the strongest. It was cleaner, easy to remember, easy to say, and it immediately gave the conference a distinct identity.”
He then told Mid-Major Madness on Thursday that the conference looked at “Metro Atlantic” and “Metropolitan” as two of the other names, insisting that the plan was never for there to be a “dramatic change.” The league determined that “Metro Atlantic” wouldn’t work because it would put them right back in an even worse position with the acronym “MAC,” and that “Metropolitan” would eventually just end up getting shortened to “Metro” anyway.
“We had a name that was very hard to say between Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference,” Tellitocci told Mid-Major Madness. “And we essentially dropped the two A’s and became the Metro Conference.”
However, by changing the name to the Metro, the league opens itself up to another level of confusion. From 1975 to 1995, a league that eventually merged into Conference USA was known as the Metro Conference, and featured programs like Cincinnati, Memphis, and Louisville. While it has been 30 years, many still hold fond memories of that conference. A few sources in college basketball outside of the MAAC told Mid-Major Madness that this was – at some level – a point of confusion for them in hearing the new name.
In response, Tellitocci mentioned that that factor was discussed, but they decided to move forward anyway.
“We discussed a lot about the history and could there be overlap,” he said. “In the end, that was more than 30 years ago. Our student athletes hadn’t even been born by that point.”
As with any name change, it will take time for the name to fully catch on. Many will still call the league the MAAC, and that legacy will follow the conference wherever it goes. It doesn’t impact the on-court product, but many in the league had positive reactions.
“I think it’s great that the league is creating a needed new identity while recognizing all the past successes,” Canisius men’s basketball head coach Jim Christian told Mid-Major Madness.
“I like the name. I think we get away from the confusion, but pay homage to our roots. I think is a good step for the conference,” Mount St. Mary’s men’s basketball head coach Donny Lind told Mid-Major Madness. “(the logo is) good, bold, simple, (and) again, avoids confusion. I think it will look good on courts and uniforms.”
“I like the name and the logo,” Marist men’s basketball head coach John Dunne, who has been a head coach in the league for 20 seasons, recording more wins while coaching a MAAC program than anybody else, told Mid-Major Madness. “I like the simplicity of it, and it makes sense.”
Sacred Heart men’s basketball head coach Anthony Latina told Mid-Major Madness that he has an “overwhelmingly positive” view of the new logo and brand. He believes that it’s a sign of the type of proactive leadership from the conference office that can keep the league alive and relevant.
The logo was a major point of contention within the project. Tellitocci points out that the color palette is cut from five down to two, and tweaks the primary red and blue slightly. According to the branding overview, the league went through 11 rounds of logo exploration before landing on what will be used as the new logo.
Tellitocci said that the expectation was to have the name and logo in early April, but the 11 rounds pushed the process back. He told Mid-Major Madness at the Basketball Championships in March that the announcement was targeted for the end of April or early May.
“We were trying too hard to force things and concepts to work,” Tellitocci said. “We explored skyline elements, we looked at symbols, we looked at icons, we looked at different visual treatments, but we kept coming back to something that was simpler, cleaner, and bolder.”
In the branding overview, the conference revealed mockups of what the logo may look like on the court, uniforms, or a field.
The MAAC also contracted consulting firm Joe Bosack & Co. as part of the process, and Tellitocci wanted to clear the air about the consultant’s role.
“I think there’s a misconception out there that the conference spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a rebrand, and that’s not the case by any means,” he told Mid-Major Madness. “We utilized a lot of the resources that we have on our campuses in terms of our marketing directors, our communication staff members. Obviously, institutionally, you’ve got a lot of expertise on campuses. The need from the consulting and the design perspective is working with somebody who has done this before in the space.”
He cited Joe Bosack & Co.’s experience with Final Four logos, the Heisman Trophy, and the Orange Bowl.
“In terms of the different parts that they were involved in the process,” Tellitocci continued. “First we had to choose a name, and obviously they were probably more of a listening sense of that and presenting some different options through that process. But we did a lot of the testing around the name with our coaches, our student athletes, our administrators, and then obviously when we got into the design element of that, we went through a lot of different rounds and tried a lot of different things.”
This weekend, MAAC baseball champion Rider will play in the NCAA Tournament’s Gainesville Regional. A few MAAC athletes are competing in the NCAA Track & Field Championships as well. Those will be the final athletes and teams to represent the MAAC.
On July 1, the conference name and logo will officially turn over. From there, Tellitocci says there are two “primary drivers from a timeliness standpoint,” in terms of implementing the new branding. Those are getting the logos down on the courts with the refinishing of the hardwood on the basketball and volleyball playing surfaces, and making sure that schools can change out their conference logos on their uniforms.
From the league office perspective, implementing the new branding into championship logos for each sport is a key step.
“The next iteration of this project, which has already started, is we have 23 championship logos to design.” Tellitocci told Mid-Major Madness. “We were due anyway to change out a lot of our championship branding. We’ve been waiting for this, probably since the day I started, of how do we reimagine the way that we brand our championships with better signage?”
He added that the simple logo design gives the league “flexibility to be creative around what those (championship logo) designs look like.”
“And we were waiting for the branding project to do that with our trophies as well, so I don’t think it necessarily adds an additional cost from that standpoint. It gives us an opportunity to look at awards differently.”
In terms of the total cost of the rebrand, Tellitocci didn’t share exact numbers, but he said what it’s not.
“I think people are thinking this is a six-figure, crazy project,” he said. “But I would tell you that’s not the case, and we’ve been able to offset some of those expenses by revenue that we’ve generated in some very creative ways.”
Among those creative ways that the league has generated revenue, Tellitocci cited a restructured investment strategy that he called “an untapped resource that we never had before.” He also said that corporate partnerships are up over the last two years, and thanks to those avenues, the league didn’t necessarily have to go to the membership to ask them to offset some of the expenses.
When Tellitocci took over as commissioner of the MAAC in 2023, he had a few key goals. He developed his strategic plan, which guided many of the other decisions, including finding a long-term home for the men’s and women’s basketball championships as well as baseball and golf, negotiating the new media rights deal with ESPN, and operationally, changing the governance structure.
“I feel like as we go now into year four of me as Commissioner,” Tellitocci said. “The foot continues to go to the gas pedal.”
