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How Southern Maryland high schools adopted their mascots
Friday, April 21, 2006
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff Photo by Reid Silverman
‘‘Ozzie the Osprey,” portrayed by Leonardtown High School cheerleading coach Katie Kuntz, shows Raider spirit on the football field.
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In the classroom, she’s a straight-A senior and on the track with the Raiders, she’s a top-flight performer.
Though her smarts and talents set her apart, one question — one that Leonardtown students often ask — stumps Mattingly.
If the school’s mascot is a bird, then why are the athletes called Raiders?
After some debate over the meaning of the word ‘‘raider” and the bird’s possible connection to the osprey — a bird of prey commonly found in the Chesapeake Bay area — Mattingly offers her final answer.
‘‘I really don’t know,” Mattingly said, looking at the blue-and-white, five-foot bird standing on the field wearing a Leonardtown Raiders jersey.
‘‘I’ve been waiting to find out for four years,” a voice from inside the bird’s costume, Leonardtown cheerleading coach Katie Kuntz, said.
From the Rams of Maurice J. McDonough to the Hurricanes of Huntingtown and the Chopticon Braves to the La Plata Warriors, the mascots of high schools in Southern Maryland are as unique as the students who embrace the symbol in school spirit or wear the brand in competition.
They raid the river, don’t they?
When Leonardtown High School opened its doors in 1978, the staff and students went to work on finding colors and a mascot to represent the institution.
‘‘The decision on the colors was made quickly,” Leonardtown Athletic Director Glenn Larnerd said, ‘‘but on the subject of the mascot there was a lot of discussion. Eventually, two favorites appeared.”
The teachers favored the seahawk.
But Larnerd said the students wanted to be named the Raiders after the 1977 Oakland Raiders, who had just won Super Bowl XI.
Eventually, the two sides found a compromise in having the image of the seahawk as the symbol and raider as the name based mostly on the ambiguity of the word ‘‘raider.”
‘‘I guess they looked at the word and decided that a raider can raid almost anything,” Larnerd said.
In this case, the teachers and students settled on the image of a seahawk with its wings outstretched and talons reaching out menacingly, preparing to raid the river.
‘‘Doesn’t a seahawk raid the river to find fish?” Larnerd asked.
The mascot’s image eventually evolved into an osprey and has gone through some more changes over the years, Larnerd said, looking more like a bald eagle under one principal, changing back to an osprey under another.
While the mascot’s name and symbol may not match, anyone missing the connection could’ve seen the answer to the riddle dancing in front of them at Leonardtown’s home football games this season.
Every time one of Leonardtown’s students donned a costume of an oversized bird wearing blue and silver, he or she carried the true spirit of the mascot in its name on the back of an old lacrosse jersey: Ozzie, which is a spin on the name osprey.
At Great Mills High School, student-athletes are known as the Hornets and that mascot, according to Julius A. Levay, comes from a terse relationship he had with one of his students.
In the early 1950s, Levay, known to his friends as Hank, was teaching biology at Great Mills High School.
‘‘In my biology class was a young man whose name was John Hudson,” 81-year-old Levay said from his vacation home in Bradenton, Fla. ‘‘Now he tried to be an athlete and I guess I was rather strict with him so he nicknamed me ‘Hank the Hornet’.”
In 1954, Great Mills constructed a new gymnasium and according to Levay, Hudson was part of a group responsible for deciding on what to put on the gym floor.
‘‘Hudson led the team in the painting of a hornet in the middle of the basketball court,” Levay said, ‘‘and he called it ‘Hank the Hornet.’ I guess that name just stuck.”
Levay moved on to be the principal at Chopticon High School when it opened in 1965 and had a hand in picking that institution’s mascot, too — although that story is much shorter. ‘‘We asked the student body to submit names,” Levay said. ‘‘At the time, Stanley Schrader was supervisor of transportation and physical education. Stan and I got a feeling from the students as to what they wanted and that’s how the Braves came out.”
Some get a choice,some don’t
Even before the first day of class at North Point High School for Science, Technology and Industry opened in Waldorf, students had the mascot picked out.
‘‘In the fall of last year,” North Point Principal Peter Cevenini said, ‘‘we had a team of future students, parents and staff members form a committee to select the mascot and colors.”
The eagle was an easy choice for the selection committee, given the location and academic standards of the school.
‘‘They selected the eagle because it was a very strong bird,” Cevenini said. ‘‘With the eagle you get these images of it soaring over the hills. It represents a lot of the things we think North Point stands for.”
North Point is the northern-most high school in Charles County, which makes the high flying eagle appropriate to Cevenini.
‘‘We always looked at North Point as the top of the mountain with the eagle looking down from the peak,” Cevenini said.
North Point opened in August with students in grades seven, eight and nine. As those ninth-grade students grow into seniors, so will North Point. The school will change into a traditional high school over the course of three years.
Cevenini said even though the students attending North Point aren’t technically high school students, they have embraced the mascot nonetheless.
‘‘The kids wear the Eagles stuff all the time,” Cevenini said. ‘‘It has really taken off. We actually have an eagle mascot named Eddy. He has made appearances at several events and the kids identify strongly with the symbol.”
Many of the high schools in Southern Maryland allowed their students to select the mascot. According to Wallace Roberts, vice principal at Patuxent High School in Lusby, the students picked the panther when the school opened in 1996. The mounted warrior, a symbol of ‘‘strength, power, endurance and perseverance,” according to La Plata High School Principal Don Cooke, has been that school’s symbol since 1957.
The students of Southern Maryland Christian Academy, a private K-12 school in White Plains, voted to have the Mustangs as their mascot when the institution opened in 1985.
Westlake High School opened in 1992 in Waldorf, but a year before, the school’s future ninth-graders were contacted and polled as to what the mascot should be. Westlake Athletic Director Dominic Zaccarelli said those students chose the wolverine, which according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is a ‘‘dark, shaggy-coated flesh-eating mammal of northern forests.”
The students of Henry E. Lackey High School in Indian Head chose that school’s mascot, the Chargers. A charger is ‘‘a knight on a horse with a lance” according to Athletic Director David Anderson.
St. Mary’s Ryken, a Catholic private school in Leonardtown, has a knight of its own as a mascot but that armor-clad warrior was born out of the school’s seal — not a student vote. According the school’s handbook, the cross that appears on the left side of its seal ‘‘represents the knightly Crossland cross which appears on the flag and seal of the State of Maryland ... and suggests the Knight as the school’s mascot.”
In other schools, the administrators picked the mascots.
According to Thomas Stone High School Athletic Director Kevin Heider, the school’s first principal, William Dulaney, picked the cougar as the mascot for the students when the institution opened in 1969.
Maurice J. McDonough High School’s first principal selected that school’s mascot as well. When Cecil Short opened McDonough in 1976, he chose the ram as the school’s mascot.
‘‘I was impressed with the Los Angles Rams,” Short said. ‘‘I also liked the ram’s commanding presence and it’s power that is a symbol of strength, a symbol of unity and the leader of the pack.”
Short said he and a team of administrators spent about six months researching different designs for the ram — a good chunk of time considering the work was done by requesting books from libraries and pouring over pages of content because the Internet didn’t exist in 1976.
‘‘When I started McDonough I wanted it to be a unique and distinctive school,” Short said. ‘‘And it worked. When I see my former students today and I meet their children I ask, ‘Is this a little Ram?’ The kids say, ‘Yes, I’m a little Ram.’ It’s a legacy that continues.”
The Calverton Kitty Cats?
Students who call themselves the Cougars at The Calverton School, a private, K-12 school in Huntingtown, can thank Richard Gray, a former student who came up with the symbol in 1970.
Gray, now the CEO of Gray and Associates LLC in Baltimore, was in Calverton’s second graduating class when the students at the school started competing in interscholastic sports like soccer, basketball and baseball.
Growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Gray and his brother, Bill, who was a class ahead, were fascinated with muscle cars. It was in their blood, considering Dorsey Gray Ford in Prince Frederick had been in their family since 1917. ‘‘So we finally needed a mascot,” Gray said. ‘‘Being Ford guys, we were kicking around what would be a suitable mascot. We wanted some kind of animal.”
Christening Calverton’s athletes the Mustangs seemed like a given to Gray but the name just didn’t fit.
‘‘The Calverton Mustangs didn’t sound right,” Gray said, ‘‘but the Cougars sounded great. The cougar is an aggressive animal. We didn’t want to be the Cows or the Kitty Cats.”
Gray takes credit for coming up with the Cougars and gathering the students to put it to a vote, which passed.
Before Huntingtown High School opened in August 2004, staff at the school sent questionnaires to the incoming students. ‘‘The first was for the students to submit what they thought the mascot and colors should be,” Vicki Ganley, one of the staff at Huntingtown who was in on the process, said. ‘‘Then we took all of those responses and narrowed it down to the top five mascots and combos.”
The committee then sent out a second survey asking students to vote on their favorite mascot and color combination from a top-five list.
Though it took quite a bit of time to count and recount the votes, staff announced that the students had picked Hurricanes as the mascot.
Ganley said she couldn’t remember how close the voting was, but she did know that the Hawks and Hound-dogs were among the other top suggestions for the mascot.
She also said a number of future students thought the school’s colors should have been either a combination of black, blue and silver or black and red.
Even the unfortunate connection between the school’s mascot and the storms that ripped across the Gulf Coast in 2004 and 2005 didn’t have an effect on the students.
‘‘Honestly, I don’t think they ever thought of it in a negative manner,” Ganley said. ‘‘It was never from the kids’ perspective thought of as a detrimental thing. They think of it as a mascot.”
But one Calvert County high school’s mascot has undergone changes that were directly related to events in American history. Rosemary Phelps, a journalism teacher at Northern High School, is well versed in her school’s history and the name the students call themselves when they go into competition — the Patriots.
When Northern opened in 1972, it became the second high school in Calvert County. Phelps said the Northern’s students choose the school’s mascot and their decision was based partly on their love of a NFL football team and also out of respect for the first high school in the county.
‘‘The students chose the patriot because of the New England Patriots — the football team,” she said. ‘‘But the patriot we had back then, the guy standing there with a musket in his hand like a continental soldier, looked a lot like a cavalier. I think they picked something that was familiar to them.”
In the late 1980s, Ken Horsmon, now superintendent of Calvert’s public schools, was the principal of Northern and developed the mascot to have more personality and spirit.
‘‘He named him ‘Pete the Fighting Patriot’ in 1987,” Phelps said. ‘‘We still have things here that reflect that, like Pete’s Grill, another name for our cafeteria.”
Following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the mascot’s image was changed again — this time to reflect the school’s patriotism.
‘‘After 9⁄11, it was decided that Pete the Patriot would be changed to carry an American flag instead of a bayonet,” Phelps said.
As Rosemary Phelps is an authority on all things Northern, her husband, Tom, has the goods on the beginnings of Calvert High School — mainly because he lived it.
Calvert’s current mascot is a Cavalier, which is defined as a knight on horseback. Today, two crossed swords with the hilts at the top and tips pointing down, represent the cavalier’s image.
‘‘When the new high school opened,” Tom Phelps said, ‘‘We moved from the old high school which is the current middle school right down on Route 4.”
Phelps was in the first ninth-grade class at the new Calvert High School and said his old high school had a much different mascot — the Blue Devils.
‘‘But when the new high school opened they changed it to the Cavaliers,” he said. ‘‘That was to go along with the jousting tournaments and the history of the county. I don’t remember getting a vote on it, but that’s what happened.”
E-mail Ian Blyth at iblyth@somdnews.com.
