MaxPreps Mascot Mondays: Iowa 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 Iowa, there are 400 schools with mascots listed in the MaxPreps database. Listed below are the Top 15 most popular mascot names in Iowa, the mascot names that only one school owns and other mascot facts/stats.

IS IT PLAGIARISM?
One the foundations of higher education is the prohibition of plagiarism: Don't take someone else's work and call it your own. A trio of high schools in Iowa's Division 1 college cities disregarded that memo, sort of. Three of the four Division 1 colleges have a high school that stole their mascot, right in the same town. The University of Iowa has the Iowa City Little Hawks (like the U of I Hawkeyes), Iowa State has the Ames Little Cyclones and the University of Northern Iowa has the Northern University (Cedar Falls) Panthers. The only D-1 college left out? The Drake Bulldogs in Des Moines don't have any Little Bulldogs.

THESE ATHLETES WILL CATCH YOU
You can try to escape from the Fort Madison athletic teams. But they'll know the path you took. The home of the Iowa State Penitentiary, Fort Madison's sports teams are the Bloodhounds, which are dogs bred for their ability to track humans. Fort Madison is one of three schools in the nation to choose Bloodhounds, though there aren't prisons in the other two towns.

RAINING DOGS?
The athletes from Center Point-Urbana (Center Point) won't come running toward you with their fingers pointed at you. The obvious part of the mascot name is pointers, and we're referring to the breed of dog here. It's the Stormin' part that isn't quite clear. The school's logo features the dog in the middle of a tornado, so it could be that Center Point-Urbana pays homage to some of the extreme weather that strikes the Midwest. Or, it could just be "stormin'" as in the verb that means to move or rush tumultuously, violently or angrily. Because of the lightning bolt in the pointer's hand (or paw), we're going to go with the weather reference. Either way, it's a cool logo.

ORABS = ORANGE AND BLACKS
Don't waste a lot of time and effort trying to figure out what an Orab is. You won't get anywhere. Just trust the folks at Sheldon when they say that Orabs is a made-up word that is derived from the school's colors: Orange and black. If you look at the Class of 1993 reunion page, the rationale is it's OR for orange, A for and, then B for black. Then you have to make it plural with the S at the end. The Des Moines Register once called it the worst mascot name ever, and as you can imagine, they are the only Orabs in the nation. The battle cry at the high school tries to shed a little more light on it, though, as it claims that "Orabs are Winners!"

BETTER THAN NAMING YOUR MASCOT AFTER A SHOE
While we can't verify for sure that Notre Dame (Burlington) doesn't have a deal with footwear giant Nike (a la the University of Oregon), we're guessing that the school chose the Nikes instead because Nike is considered the goddess of victory in Greek mythology. In a way, you could call Notre Dame the "Winged Goddesses of Victory" but Nikes is a much shorter option. No other school in America has Nikes as its school mascot, but with budgets continuing to go down, it is conceivable that a new school could strike a sponsorship deal with Nike and maybe give up mascot naming rights to the company.

TOP 15 MOST POPULAR MASCOT NAMES
# Tigers 19 (There is 1 Tigerhawks)
# Warriors 18
# Wildcats 17
# Eagles 16 (There is 1 Golden Eagles, 1 War Eagles)
# Trojans 16
# Bulldogs 15
Hawks 14 (There are 3 Warhawks, 2 J-Hawks, 1 E'Hawks, 1 Go-Hawks, 1 Golden Hawks, 1 Kee Hawks, 1 Little Hawks, 1 Red Hawks, 1 Tigerhawks)
# Panthers 13
# Indians 12
# Mustangs 12
# Falcons 10
# Knights 9
Wolverines 9
# Lions 9
# Vikings 8
# Denotes mascot name is in America's Top 15

MASCOT NAMES USED BY ONLY 1 SCHOOL

Admirals Bearcats Beavers Bison Black Raiders Blazers Bloodhounds Blue Demons Broncos Buccaneers Chickasaws Chiefs Clippers Cubs Danes Dodgers Dons

Dragons Dutch Dutchmen * E'Hawks Gaels Generals * Go-Hawks Golden Bears Golden Eagles Golden Hawks * Grayhounds Green Devils Hawkeyes Irish Jays * Kee Hawks Lancers

* Little Cyclones * Little Hawks Mavericks Midgets Monarchs Muskies * Nikes Norsemen * Orabs Orioles Plainsmen Polar Bears Railsplitters Red Hawks Red Raiders Regals Regents

* River Kings Roadrunners Roughriders Royals Sailors Savages Scarlets * Stormin' Pointers Thunder * Tigerhawks Toreadors Tornadoes Trailblazers Warhawks War Eagles Westerners * Wheelers Yellowjackets

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

MASCOT NAMES
Most popular mascot name is used by 4.8 percent of schools.
There are 120 different mascot names for 400 schools.
12 schools have mascot names that no other American school has.
Iowa's Top 15 features 13 of America's Top 15 mascot names.