Picking a name for your high school sports teams’ mascot should be a pretty straightforward process, and you have several categories of names to choose from. You can go with animals (Eagles, Bears), historical figures (Vikings, Trojans), mythology (Devils, Titans), natural events (Hurricanes, Cyclones), or just about everything in between.
Some schools, however, throw convention out the window and go for something that has everyone else scratching their heads. This article is about those brave school administrators who chose to buck tradition and give their schools mascots that made sense only to them.
The Pretzels, New Berlin High School, New Berlin, Illinois
New Berlin is a central Illinois farming community, halfway between Springfield and nowhere. And, for close to a century now, their mascot has been the Pretzels. No one is really sure why.
In October of 2016, WICS (Springfield) reporter Jaclyn Driscoll started asking around and found that the general consensus around town is that it came from a basketball tournament in the 1920’s.
As New Berliner Theo Knust explained, “The guys were sitting around and they got done with their lunch and they started horsing around. hey were throwing pretzels at each other and the announcer of the tournament kind of coined the phrase ‘Pretzel Throwers.’”
“Pretzel Throwers” was shortened to “Pretzels,” and the rest, as they say, is history.
The Mighty Arabs, Coachella Valley High School, Thermal, California
Until 2014, according to KNBC (Los Angeles), the school’s teams were just the “Arabs,” with a mascot that depicted a scowling, hooked-nosed caricature of a Middle-Eastern brigand.
How about Coachella Valley High School here in SoCal.. The Arabs!! Is that okay? pic.twitter.com/iZqn03g6sv
— Chris Phynes (@chrisisnow) June 22, 2014
Surprisingly, some people thought that was offensive. After a public outcry, they changed their name to The Mighty Arabs and selected a “more dignified” mascot that resembles the guy from Prince of Persia .
Did you know that Coachella Valley high school’s mascot is the Mighty Arab? pic.twitter.com/zTtTLp4TKz
— ari (@not_ariel) November 4, 2016
Whether or not that’s an improvement I’ll leave to the reader.
But how did they get the name the Arabs anyway? The area around Thermal is filled with date farms, traditionally a Middle-Eastern crop. The school founders, back in the 1920s, wanted to honor that tradition.
The Hoboes, Laurel Hill High School, Laurel Hill, Florida
Like the Pretzels back in Illinois, it looks like the Hoboes of Laurel Hill got their name from an off-hand comment someone once made. Speaking to Northwest Florida Daily News , Laurel Hill graduate Bill Price, Class of ’49, said that he was joking around one day about his plans for after high school.
“We was just talking, I said, ‘Well, I don’t what I’m going to do. Maybe I’ll just be a hobo and ride the freight trains.’”
Later, when the boys weren’t giving 100 percent at practice, the coach called them “Hoboes.” The name stuck.
The Appleknockers, Cobden High School, Cobden, Illinois
We conclude our tour of weird school mascots with a return to Illinois, this time to the southern Illinois farming community of Cobden. The area around the town is rich with apple and peach orchards, and, well, you can see where this is going.
Tonight is the big night… Homecoming 2016! The fun starts at 5:00pm with the JV game. Let’s go Appleknockers! pic.twitter.com/keaA8GAJ18
— COBDEN HIGH SCHOOL (@cobden_high) January 29, 2016
According to a 2016 report in the Southern Illinoisian , before the Cobden teams had a name, their opponents derisively called them “ Apple Knockers ” in reference to the farm workers who knocked fruit out of trees with sticks. As any fan of the Cubs, Yankees, [Trolley-] Dodgers, or Pirates will tell you, if you give a team a derisive nickname, they’ll wear it like a badge of honor for the next century.
This is just a small sampling of weird school mascots. As there are tens of thousands of public and private schools across the U.S., a few of them are bound to wind up with names outside of the animals-mythology-natural events-history tradition, in favor of something weird. Share your weird high school mascot stories in the comments below.
[Featured Image by View Apart /Shutterstock]
