In-N-Out Made a High School Football Team Delete Its Viral Team Photos

A behind-the-scenes video from the shoot drew nearly a million Instagram views before the chain's trademark team demanded it all come down.

In-N-Out made a high school football team in Lincoln, a Sacramento suburb, delete photos its players shot inside the team's favorite burger stand.

The pictures were already a hit. A behind-the-scenes video of the shoot had piled up nearly a million views on Instagram, the Los Angeles Times first reported. The Lincoln High Fighting Zebras posed in full uniform and helmets behind the counter and leaning out the drive-thru window.

In-N-Out's trademark team didn't love it.

The idea came from Chelsey Vanderschrier, a team mom and booster club member, who'd seen other high school teams online staging media day photos at fast-food spots. The players already treat the local In-N-Out as their Friday night spot after games, she told the Times, so it felt like the obvious backdrop.

The booster club hired photographer Glenn Silva, and he did what most of us would assume was enough. He asked the manager of the Lincoln restaurant, who said yes and even let the team in an hour before opening. The photos were meant for the players and their families.

Then came a Sept. 23 email from corporate. The chain said it guards its brand and trade dress closely, and that using its premises, signs or logos without permission “may constitute a violation of our intellectual property rights,” according to the message the Times reviewed.

Silva pushed back politely. He told the company's lawyer he thought he'd gotten approval, asked for a one-time exception and offered to rewrite captions or strip tags so the kids could keep the moment. No dice. Store managers can't sign off on commercial or promotional shoots, a company representative wrote; that takes written permission from the corporate office ahead of time. On Sept. 24, an attorney said the retroactive request had been considered and turned down, and closed with: “Please confirm once the content has been taken down.”

The team took it all down that afternoon.

Two law experts who spoke to the Times doubted In-N-Out would win if this ever reached a courtroom. Mark McKenna, a UCLA law professor, said nobody scrolling past would mistake it for a brand partnership. “It's a high school football team; they're not really commercial users,” he said.

Vincent Joralemon, a senior fellow at UC Berkeley School of Law, explained the chain's logic: when it fights a bigger trademark case, it helps to show it never let anyone slide, because a court could read a pile of unchallenged school shoots as a weak brand. He wasn't sure this one was worth it. “It's always a calculation to say what's the PR cost going to be,” he said.

None of this is new for the chain. In-N-Out sued a Utah burger joint in 2007 over menu names and a look-alike color scheme, sued Puma in 2019 over sneakers that resembled its employee uniforms, and in 2024 sent a cease-and-desist letter to a San Diego sports bar over “animal-style” fries. Now it can add a team of teenagers in shoulder pads to the list. The legal department never sleeps, and apparently it never eats a Double-Double in peace either.

In-N-Out didn't respond to the Times' request for comment. Lincoln High's athletic director referred questions to the Western Placer Unified School District, which hadn't responded by publication of the Times story.

Vanderschrier said the players were glad to comply and avoid any more legal trouble, but it still stung. “It's a bummer because the photos were so unique and it was really cool to see them go viral,” she said.

The chain keeps growing down here, too: the Times reported Sept. 29 that three new In-N-Out locations are coming to Southern California. If your kid's team gets the same idea at one of them, skip the manager and write to corporate first, well before anyone puts on a helmet.

Source: latimes.com, retrieved October 1, 2026.