I played high school 9-man football for the Hendricks Huskies of sleepy little Hendricks, Minnesota. Even back in the late 1980s, small schools were beginning to consolidate in Minnesota and around the country. Small-town teams began to lose their identity, forging new identities by combining forces with former rivals. Two years after I graduated, the Hendricks Huskies faded into memory, joining with the former Ivanhoe Eagles, our archrival and nemesis, to form the Lincoln H I Rebels.

Now, there's nothing that's all that unusual about a Huskie, or an Eagle, or even a Rebel. But some unique team names were giving way to history, such as the Jasper Quartziters, Tracy Scrappers, Walnut Grove Loggers, and the Granite Falls Kilowatts.

The seed had been planted that it would really cool to have a list of all the sports team nicknames of high schools. Turns out there are many more unusual names! I attended Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota; home of the Concordia Cobbers! The high school team in Moorhead is known as the Spuds! Currently, my day job is as a web programmer for the Arizona State University Sun Devils.

Reading up and discussing great and interesting team nicknames and mascots has always been a fun pastime for me. This led me to this project - a searchable database of team nicknames and mascots for high school, college, and professional sports teams in the United States and Canada. This is a particularly ambitious project, as records of team nicknames and mascots of inactive and defunct teams can be difficult to locate, especially for high schools. With the aide of a helpful and willing site audience, MASCOTdb.com will help provide information on sports team nicknames, as well as providing lists of mascots by topic (such as unusual mascots, non-threatening mascots, etc.). We'll also work on providing answers to burning questions such as "What is a Hoya? What is a Catamount?" that seem to surface around March Madness time.

Have questions? Information to share? Please feel free to contact me.

Read more about Terry and MascotDB.com at Minnesota Prairie Roots

MascotDB.com was used as a source for FiveThirtyEight.com's feature The 2,128 Native American Mascots People Aren’t Talking About, and later ESPN's Washington finally shed the name, but 37 high schools haven't, as well as many other media features.