The Southern Miss “Gold-N-Proud” Campaign (2010)

I started graduate school at Southern Miss in 2010. As I was going through grad school, one thing that I didn’t exactly get along with was the school motto “To The Top.” It wasn’t a bad motto, but I was of the opinion at that time as a 24-year old “dummy” a different direction couldn’t hurt and could be an addition.

So in October, I started making an attempt to establish “Gold-N-Proud” as a new alternate slogan. #SMGnP started out as a poster I got printed at a shop and passed it around to a few people for free in roughly October 2010. I used one of my images of Seymour and an image from Big Gold Photography of a group of players in the poster.

The following month, after a college football game in Florida, a few players went to a local club in Hattiesburg, Mississippi when 3 players were shot. Two were linebackers and one was a defensive lineman. All three survived, but one was paralyzed due to the incident.

At the time of finding out about the incident, I went back to my photography work to see if I had on-the-field photos of all three players, and sure enough, I did. So I gathered them together and put the Gold-N-Pround slogan to use again, and it caught on like wildfire on Facebook and Twitter among the USM fanbase. It was edited twice, one with “Family of Thousands United” and one “Even After Adversity We Are Still…” requested by the coaching staff and players.

I was struggling through the week between work and school when another idea was requested to make t-shirts off it to sell to help pay for the players’ hospital bills. Got the files given to a local screenprinter via USB drive because I couldn’t email my stuff while at work. I came out to the game that following Saturday to find out they were going to sell over 1000 shirts to the public.