Shootout teams boast some curious nicknames

Chanticleers. Toreros. Catamounts.

Try using those in a sentence that doesn't say something along the lines of "the Toreros beat the Chanticleers and will play the Catamounts tonight."

Seawolves. Bearcats. Sooners.

Only one of those has a listing in Webster's. The other two are flat made up.

Thank goodness for Washington State and Houston. Both are nicknamed the Cougars, a mascot rooted in reality, not imagination.

And then there's Nicholls State, which has a moniker that doesn't send you to the dictionary -- the Colonels -- but which sent plenty of people into hysteria earlier this year when the school introduced a new logo to replace the old one that looked more than a little like a Confederate officer -- this at a Louisiana school whose enrollment is about 17 percent African-American.

UNIQUE NICKNAMES

Of the nine schools with teams at this year's tournament, three boast that their mascot is one of the most unique in sports.

"The Chanticleer gives Coastal Carolina University one of the most unique nicknames in all of sports," says the Coastal Carolina media guide.

"In the Seawolf, the University of Alaska Anchorage has one of the most unique mascots in the country," says the UAA media guide.

"College sports fans are hard pressed to find a nickname that is as unique and as tied to a state's history as a Sooner," says the University of Oklahoma media guide.

The Coastal Carolina media guide explains that the name Chanticleers -- pronounced SHON-ti-cleers -- was inspired by a character from Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales." The character was a rooster, and so is the school's mascot, which appears in the team's cartoonish logo as an angry-looking bird. Think Foghorn Leghorn in a steroid rage.

UAA's Seawolf is "a mythical sea creature," and anyone fortunate to see one is subject to good fortune, according to the university. Before they were the Seawolves, they were the Sourdoughs, a nickname steeped in state history much like the Sooners. Sourdough was the name given to Alaska's early gold prospectors and settlers, just as Sooner was the name given to settlers lured to Oklahoma by the 1889 Land Run.

The University of San Diego used to call its teams the Pioneers, but in 1961 the Pioneers became the Toreros, or bullfighters. The school's Web site says the name "is in keeping with the friendly relationship which exists between San Diego and Mexico," which seems a little like the Seawolves becoming the Mounties as an homage to Alaska's ties with Canada.

The Catamounts of Western Carolina draw their name from a catch-all word for a variety of wildcats like bobcats and lynx, both of which roam the Appalachians.

The University of Cincinnati is known as the Bearcats -- another invention of the imagination, but one with ties to the school's past.

The story goes that in 1914, Cincinnati's football team hosted the Kentucky Wildcats. Cincinnati didn't have a mascot at the time, but it had a fullback named Leonard "Teddy" Baehr, and during the game his efforts inspired a Cincinnati cheerleader to chant, "They may be Wildcats, but we have a Baehr-cat on our side."

And so the Bearcats were born.

A NEW LOGO

The city of Anchorage can empathize with Nicholls State. Earlier this year the school unveiled a new logo created by an out-of-state "branding" consultant, and the proposal immediately became embroiled in a big wild controversy.

The Louisiana school is named after former Confederate general and state governor Francis Redding Tillou Nicholls, and for years the Nicholls State mascot was -- as the Associated Press once described it -- "a wild-eyed, saber-wielding old man with a pointy white beard in a Confederate uniform." Because the school is named after a Confederate general, and because the Colonel mascot was decked out in school colors, and because the school colors include the same gray worn by the Confederate army, many assumed the Colonel was a Confederate officer.

It wasn't, said Renee Piper, director of university relations at Nicholls State.

"We're named the Colonels because we used to be an ROTC school and colonel is the highest rank in ROTC," she said.

But a few years back, a member of the school's NAACP chapter called the mascot offensive. In 2004, the school president retired the mascot costume and logo but kept the nickname Colonels.

Students and alumni howled in protest. Wikipedia reports the students retaliated by selecting the nutria -- an ugly, semi-aquatic rat -- as their choice for a new mascot, but "that's not true," Piper said . Some students suggested the nutria, she said, while others suggested crawfish and eagles, and still others insisted on keeping the Colonel.

For five years the school went without a mascot, and the letter N served as its logo. Then the school formed study groups, hired a branding consultant for $20,000 and went about creating a new mascot and logo. (Anchorage paid $200,000 to rebrand the city's image a few years ago, and part of what the money bought was the Big Wild Life slogan.)

When Nicholls State unveiled its new logo in August, outrage followed. The general consensus was the new logo, that of a clean-shaven, chiseled-faced man wearing a red military uniform and wielding a sword, looks like a Nazi.

"Nicholls State trades racism for fascism?" asks one of many online debates about the logo. As of this week, an anti-mascot Facebook page boasts more than 400 friends.

Piper said she didn't anticipate the new image would provoke such a vociferous response.

"Not to the level that it did, and maybe that was naive," she said.

Within a week, the firestorm was front-page news of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Piper, who has been in her job for three years, can't remember any other time Nicholls State made the front page of Louisiana's biggest newspaper.

"We could have not bought that much coverage," she said. "Within a week's time of our low-budget release of the logo, we got front-page coverage from the Times-Picayune. People knew about our new mascot and they knew what it looked like. Check that to-do box done."

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Find Beth Bragg online at adn.com/contact/bbragg or call 257-4335.