Imps - Cary (NC) High School

We’re number one!  We’re number one!  We’re number one!  

Yup, the Cary Imps are the reigning winners of the 2023 Sports Illustrated High School Fan National annual mascot competition. Go Imps!

Cary is part of the Research Triangle Park, in North Carolina. It’s got about 180,000 people, and includes SAS, Lockheed Martin, Xerox, Epic Games, and Garmin among its employers. This tech hub includes plenty of replants, and is jokingly referred to as the “Containment Area for Relocated Yankees” by natives.

The high school dates back to 1896, when it was private. In 1907, it went public, becoming the first public high school in the state. It has about 2,100 students, and is known for its band & wrestling team. Wikipedia lists 20 alumni, only one I’ve heard of. 

The name? It’s after the JV team for the Duke Blue Devils, the Blue Imps, and dates back to the 1930s. To honor another nearby university, the team was originally called the White Imps, after UNC’s then White Phantoms (now, of course, the Tar Heels). 

The color was dropped eventually. Not sure where the green came from.

I’m pretty sure I saw these guys play once. I can’t remember, though, if it was in basketball, football, baseball, or wrestling

Hippos – Hutto (TX) High School

Alliterative, rhyming, short, sweet … This one’s a winner.

Hutto’s a town of 28,000 (and growing!), 20 miles northeast of Austin. It dates back to 1855, and was originally a railroad town. It’s named after John Hutto, who provided the initial land.

The high school has 1,850 students and 120 teachers. They’ve won state titles in tennis and volleyball. Alumni include 2 NFL players.

They feature this rather odd mascot. 

There are several possibilities with this one:

• A hippo broke loose from a circus train in town
• A comment from an opposing coach on Hutto’s beefy football players 
• The Hippodrome Theatre
• Hippo Size Soda Water

It’s said to date back to 1923.

The town has really taken the hippo theme to heart. 

There are supposedly over 1,000 concrete statues (with a guide to them all right here). The biggest is Henrietta, weighing in at 14,000 lbs.

Hoboes – Laurel Hill (FL) School

One of my favorite scenes in the baseball classic Bull Durham is when the manager berates his players for their seeming lack of effort:

Skip: You guys. You lollygag the ball around the infield. You lollygag your way down to first. You lollygag in and out of the dugout. You know what that makes you? Larry!

Larry: Lollygaggers!

Skip: Lollygaggers.

Sounds like something very similar happened down at the Laurel Hill School, in Florida. Seems basketball coach Rex Wright was upset with his players for not showing more effort, calling them hoboes, instead of lollygaggers. The team just so happened to be looking for a mascot at the time, so the name stuck.

Another theory is that the name simply came from the town’s railroad history, especially between the wars (i.e., the 1920s and ‘30s), when there were indeed many hoboes in the area. And a final theory comes from Cracked.com: “because school administrators wish to furnish their students with realistic expectations for the future.”

However it may be, the school is quick to point out that, “Unlike tramps or bums, the hoboes are usually very resourceful, self-reliant and appreciative people. They display the quiet pride that comes from self-confidence and the secure knowledge that they control their own destiny." Sure.

Laurel Hill is in the Panhandle, practically in Alabama. The town of 600 dates back to 1821, when it was known as Almirante. And, yes, they do have an annual hobo festival.

The school goes from K-12 and has about 450 students total. In spite of the name, it is indeed a public school.

And this one, in East Setauket NY, is private

And, of course, they have a mascot. In fact, they have two!

The first is a real person, local pastor Mike McVey, who’s been doing it for over 20 years.

The second is his grandson, who dons a rather scary homemade outfit.

You can check out the latter busting some moves on YouTube. 

The school also has their own song … sort of. You can check that out right here.  

Hematites – Ishpeming (MI) High School

As if Ishpeming wasn’t bad enough as is ... It’s kind of like if your last name is Humperdink. Jim or Bill might go good with that, you know. Definitely not Englebert though.

So what is a hematite anyway? It’s basically just a mineral form of iron oxide – i.e., the basis of iron ore, the primary input into making steel. 

So, why not the Steelers, or the Miners, or … anything else, for that matter?

Mining the stuff does actually seem to be the town’s reason for being. Founded in 1868, Ishpeming currently has about 6,500 people. It’s parked firmly in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

And speaking of that last bit, Ishpeming is also the home of the band Da Yoopers, as well as the Da Yoopers Tourist Trap, Museum & Rock Shop.

Apart from the iron ore, the town is also the birthplace of skiing in US, and is home to the National Ski Hall of Fame. Why is that, you might ask. Swedes, lots and lots of Swedes.

The town does have some famous sons, including Chuck Fairbanks (college & NFL coach), Tom Izzo (longtime Michigan State basketball coach) & Glenn Seaborg (Nobel-winning chemist).

The high school dates back to 1874, with complete rebuilds in 1908 and 1930. Currently, there are only about 210 students. Interestingly, the mascot dates all the way back to 1901. 

It’s a small school, so when the Hematites won the state football championship, it made Sports Illustrated.

It’s quite a story … The Div 7 school had only 30 players, with a number of the team playing both offense and defense. They also had a backup kicker with Down’s syndrome, a player who had to fight a long, protracted legal battle to even be on the team. To make things even more dramatic, they also had a star receiver pass away, the coach’s son & former QB commit suicide, and a future star get killed by a drunk driver. Finally, they had lost a previous final in the final seconds two years previously. Oh, and let’s not forget the 7+ hour drive the team had to make. Whew!

Halfbreeds – Aniak (AK) High School

Come again? 

I mean, Wikipedia is telling me that “Half-breed is a term, now considered offensive, used to describe anyone who is of mixed race; although, in the United States, it usually refers to people who are half Native American and half European/white.” Not exactly PC, is it?

So, if the Redskins became the Commanders, and the Indians the Guardians, how come we still have something like the Halfbreeds? Well, this is one that the community just so happened to choose themselves. As the school board president at the time commented, "Most people are of mixed race, mixed background. We're proud of it.” Kind of like the Fighting Irish, I guess.

The teams had formerly been the Apostles (boys) & Angels (girls). Surprisingly, Halfbreeds actually came along in the late 1970s. 

Aniak is a town of 500+ people and is about 300 miles east of Anchorage. It’s accessible only by boat (on the Kuskokwim River) or air.  Winters feature temps of -55 and snow accumulations of 60 inches. The town dates back to a gold strike in 1910.

The high school has 55 students and a staff of 7 (including the bus driver). Somehow or other, they manage to field 4 teams – basketball and volleyball squads for both genders. Not too surprisingly, those are both indoor sports.

Golden Mules – Solanco (PA) High School

Now, mules are a weird enough mascot as is. But golden mules? That’s taking it to another level.

The first thing to know about Solanco is that it is not a town. Instead, it’s the nickname for the school district of Southern Lancaster County – SoLanCo. The district covers 180 sq miles, with not quite 32,000 people (and only the 1 high school).

We’re talking about the southeast corner of PA here, along the Susquehanna River and equidistant to Harrisburg & Philadelphia.

The high school is actually located in Quarryville. This town of 2,500 is right smack-dab in the middle of – drum roll, please – southern Lancaster County. It’s also home to the Solanco Fairgrounds.

Could be anywhere

The school has slightly over 1,000 students. Between the girls and the boys, they field 18 different sports teams. “Notable alumni” include 3 folks, a politician & NBA player I never heard of, plus a baseball player that I have.

Nice parking lot

It sounds like – once again – a sportswriter was behind the mascot. According to a local paper:

“’Bricker [said sportswriter] would drive down to cover football games and during the trip would view numerous mule teams toiling in the fields. He likened the boys on the gridiron to the hard-working, never-give-up nature of the mule, and since Solanco was wearing yellow jerseys, he referred to them as the Golden Mules.”

The original mascot was a real mule:

These days, though, we’ve got ourselves another furry:

Plus, they’ve got one of these crazy things:

Flivvers – Kingsford (MI) High School

Kingsford is a town of 5,100 in Michigan’s Upper Penisula, right on the border with Wisconsin. It’s got a paper mill, a foundry, and a ski resort (with a famous ski jump). Not much around, but it does look very pretty.

The town came to being in 1923, and was named after real estate agent EG Kingsford. He had bought up some acreage for the Ford Motor Company, to supply & process wood parts for automobiles, esp. woody station wagons.

Hence the flivvers. If you’re not familiar with that rather out-of-date term, it’s basically the same as “jalopy” or “beater.”  The term itself is of unknown origin.

The town is also the source of Kingsford Charcoal, originally made from leftover wood from the Ford plant. It was originally called Ford Charcoal, but changed its name to Kingsford when Ford got out of the business and some local business leaders bought in. I’m sure everyone out there has used that stuff at sometime or other.

Local teams were originally called the Fords. A sportswriter, desperate for a little elegant variation I would imagine, coined them the Flivvers, which seems to have stuck.

The high school has a restored Model T in the lobby. They have redone it, though, in the school colors of blue and yellow. 

The school itself has not quite 600 students. They play their outdoor sports at the awesomely alliterative Flivver Field.

Here the site of a Model-T club meetup

Not too surprisingly, winter sports are quite popular.