Nike Chicago Hoops
Crowning the Kings of Summer

We worked with Nike to create the branding and campaign for their Chicago Summer Hoops initiative.

Chi-city holds a basketball legacy that is rich and storied — and defined through a lineage of heroic athletes. From Sonny Parker, Isiah Thomas, Ben Wilson, and Tim Hardaway — to Juwan Howard, Kevin Garnett, Shawn Marion, Dwyane Wade, and Jabari Parker — the list goes on and on. Although some try to refer to Chicago as the “second city” — it reigns as basketball’s purest home, a place where the game exists undistracted by the East Coast flair of New York or the West Coast/Hollywood dreams of LA.

To help galvanize the city of Chicago around High School basketball, GrandArmy was asked to develop an identity, campaign, and holistic graphic system for Nike's Summer Hoops tournament. The tournament centers around 8 city schools and GrandArmy re-imagined the branding for each school as part of the overall campaign.

The Mid-West’s blue-collar heritage forms a solid base for Chicago’s basketball mentality, where the two go hand in hand like no other, and it's from this heritage that we drew our inspiration and developed the HS Hoops visual language.