MaxPreps Mascot Mondays: South Carolina high school mascots

Just as important as a school's name and its location is its mascot. Options abound, and some teams go with the commonplace while others go with the truly unique.

In South Carolina, there are 255 schools with mascots listed in the MaxPreps database. Listed below are the Top 15 most popular mascot names in South Carolina, the mascot names that only one school owns and other mascot facts/stats.

FEAR THE AUCTIONEERS
They honor fast talkers at Mullins. It's the least they could do for the men who donated their money to help the school. According to Marc's Distinctive High School Mascot Collection, the mascot name at the school was Tornadoes until a need for new uniforms and equipment arose. One of the coaches lobbied local tobacco warehousemen and got the funding, so he decided to honor them by changing the name to Auctioneers, a reference to how tobacco is sold by some growers. A guy hollering words at rapid-fire pace isn't very easy to make a logo from, so the school uses an Indian warrior as its logo.

GATORS IN THE WILD
A gator is scary enough when it's a "domesticated" one. A gator from the wild is much more dangerous. The mascot name for Lake View takes gators to a more unpredictable and lethal level, adding "Wild" to make Wild Gators. You will find a lot of gators in America but evidently they all live in cages or in some type of animal parks. The ones from Lake View are the only gators that are free to roam and don't get their food from humans. In our opinion, that adds a lot of reason to be scared. And our other opinion is that the logo isn't as wild looking as we expected.

SWAMP FOXES AREN'T FOXES FROM THE SWAMP
We've seen plenty of schools that combine some word with an animal name and turn it into a mascot choice. At Marion, it would appear that they wanted to be foxes but decided to be Swamp Foxes because of some swamps nearby. But that's not the inspiration. Marion is named after Francis Marion, and Francis Marion was named the "Swamp Fox" by British the military during the Revolutionary War. History says that British forces never could find Marion and his men in the swamps, and British Colonel Banastre Tarleton was quoted as saying "As for this damned old fox, the Devil himself could not catch him."

DEVILDOGS = SEMPER FIDELIS
Travelers Rest did not want to be known as canines possessed by Satan. It wanted to honor the United State Marine Corps. The school is the Devildogs, and it's a term that can be traced back to World War I. The Germans called the Marines "Teufelshunde" and that translates roughly to devil dogs or dogs from hell, though there is some confusion about whether Americans or Germans came up with the phrase. Travelers Rest could have just been the Marines, like three other schools in the nation, but went with the much more colorful reference.

BATTLING BISHOPS WITH BOXING GLOVES
Church men aren't afraid to duke it out, according to the logo for Bishop England (Charleston). In one of the better mascot logos we've seen in a while, with a pious-looking bishop donning a set of boxing gloves and gritting his teeth in a tough-guy look. Bishop England is touted as the largest Catholic high school in the stat, and it takes the bishop mascot name to a much more entertaining level by adding the "battling" part.

TOP 15 MOST POPULAR MASCOT NAMES
# Eagles 18 (There are 2 War Eagles and 1 Blue Eagles)
# Warriors 10
# Bulldogs 10
Yellowjackets 10 (There is 1 Blue Jackets)
# Tigers 9 (There is 1 Fighting Tigers)
# Panthers 9
# Wildcats 8
# Trojans 8
Cavaliers 7
# Knights 7
# Raiders 6 (There are 2 Red Raiders)
# Falcons 5
Rebels 5
# Vikings 5
Red Devils 5 (There are 2 Blue Devils)
# Denotes mascot name is in America's Top 15

MASCOT NAMES USED BY ONLY 1 SCHOOL

*Auctioneers Barons *Battling Bishops Bengals Blue Eagles *Blue Flame *Blue Flashes Blue Jackets Capitals Centurions Chargers Confederates

Demons *Devildogs *Diamond Hornets *Fighting Gamecocks *Fighting Gators *Fighting Green Hornets *Fighting Hawks Fighting Hornets Fighting Tigers Flashes Golden Rams Hawks

Highlanders Islanders Mavericks Mohawks Monarchs *Predators Raptors Razorbacks *Red Foxes Sabres Shamrocks Skyhawks

Spartans Stags Stars *Swamp Foxes *Swampcats Thoroughbreds Timberwolves Volunteers War Hawks Warhorses Whirlwinds *Wild Gators Wolves

* Denotes that no other school in America has that mascot name

MASCOT STATS
Most popular mascot name is used by 7.1 percent of schools.
There are 96 different mascot names for 255 schools.
15 schools have mascot names that no other American school has.
South Carolina's Top 15 features 11 of America's Top 15 mascot names.