One major way the City of Liberty supports the LHS Blue Jays is through the name, “Blue Jay Drive” off of Highway 152 by the high school. For the sake of The Royals, however, this name simply would not work during the American League Championship Series. With the help of social media, the city changed the name of the street from Blue Jay Drive to Royals Drive during the series.
“The idea came from a local news reporter through Liberty. He was at the stoplight at Kansas and Blue Jay, took a photo of the street sign and put it on Twitter saying the sign should be changed for the series,” Emergency Preparedness Division Representative and head of social media for the Clay County Sheriff’s office Jon Bazzano said. “I happened to see that, and tagged the City of Liberty in the post, thinking it would be a great idea.”
The person behind the City of Liberty’s Twitter account is Sara Cooke, the Communications Manager for the City of Liberty.
“I then made a phone call to the city administrator,” Cooke said. “He said it was a great idea.”
The city administrator then made phone calls to the school district and the city council to see if they were on board. Once the City of Liberty got the okay, they got Public Works involved. They then worked with a sign company in North Kansas City to get the street sign made. Within three hours, the sign was up. It won’t be there for long, however. The street will go back to the name Blue Jay Drive when the ALCS is over.
“Part of the reason why it happened so quickly is that the City of Liberty has a good working relationship with the County and the School District,” Cooke said. “Everybody was on board and supportive of the whole idea.”
The public’s reaction to the street sign has been overall very positive, with very few negative comments.
“There’s community pride,” Bazzano said. “People are saying things about how it is cool that Liberty is doing such a thing like this and that they’re supporting the Royals.”
The City of Liberty Posted about the change on Facebook, which received recognition from over 410,000 people. On Twitter, the post has received recognition from more than 22,000 people.
The comments about the change have not only been from people in the Kansas City area.
“We have received comments from people in Texas, Tennessee and even Canada,” Cooke said. “It is well beyond anything that we have ever seen.”
Public Works support from Liberty has proven to work in the past. Liberty “blue’ed” their fountain water in support of Kansas City’s professional Women’s Soccer team, FCKC, when they played for the National Championship in 2014.
“We blue’ed the fountain, and FCKC went on to win the championship,” Cooke said. “We’re hoping our support for the Royals is good luck.”
And that it was. The Kansas City Royals defeated the Toronto Blue Jays in 6 games to go to the World Series again against the New York Mets, and the City of Liberty will now go back to supporting both the Blue Jays and the Royals.