10 Louisiana High School Mascots You Won’t Find Anywhere Else in America
LAFAYETTE, La. — Louisiana has more than 30 schools calling themselves Tigers and another 20-plus going by Bulldogs, but tucked between those crowded fields are a handful of mascots that exist nowhere else in American high school sports. One traces back to a student vote at an all-girls school in 1964. Another only exists because a French teacher once worked up the nerve to write Charles Schulz a letter.
With football season back underway across the state, here’s a look at 10 of Louisiana’s most one-of-a-kind high school mascots, plus a few honorable mentions that deserve their own spotlight.
Archbishop Chapelle Chipmunks (Metairie)
Chipmunks don’t exactly scream intimidation, and that’s the point. Archbishop Chapelle’s own school history traces the name to a 1964 student council contest, when Raiderettes, Fleur de Lis, Shamrocks and Chapelle’s Belles all lost out to Chipmunks by a landslide. Former school president Beth Johnson later described the choice as “alert, inquisitive, sociable and communicative,” a fitting identity for an all-girls Catholic school that’s sent 14,000 alumnae into the world since 1962. It’s also, as far as anyone has found, the only Chipmunks in American high school sports.
St. Joseph’s Academy Redstickers (Baton Rouge)
Baton Rouge translates to “red stick” in French, a nod to a red cypress tree that once marked Native American hunting grounds, and St. Joseph’s Academy built its entire mascot identity around that history. Every student is a Redsticker, according to the school’s athletics page, but they also belong to one of four rotating class mascots: Flamingo, Bee, Turtle or Dolphin, depending on graduation year. No other Louisiana school splits its mascot identity quite like this.
Loyola College Prep Flyers (Shreveport)
A French teacher named Gerald McCaffery is the reason Loyola College Prep gets to put Snoopy chasing the Red Baron across a doghouse-turned-Sopwith Camel on its helmets. McCaffery wrote to Charles Schulz in 1966 asking permission to use the Peanuts character, and Schulz said yes, sending along the original artwork himself, according to Loyola’s own account of the mascot’s origin.
Six decades later, it’s still the only high school mascot in the country with that kind of direct blessing from a cartoonist. The tradition got a new addition this fall: Loyola introduced its first-ever live mascot, a beagle named Flyer, training to become a certified therapy dog who’ll appear alongside students at pep rallies and games this season.
Kenner Discovery Health Sciences Academy Swamp Owls (Kenner)
There’s no missing Kenner Discovery’s mascot the moment you pull onto campus. A nearly 12-foot steel sculpture of a barred owl, installed by artist Scott Hebert and cataloged by the City of Kenner’s public art program, watches over the school grounds. Barred owls, often called swamp owls in south Louisiana, don’t turn up under any other mascot name in high school athletics nationally, a distinction SI High School’s own mascot survey (cited below) has also found, making Kenner Discovery’s identity both a hometown nod to the state’s wetlands and a genuine national outlier.
Crowley High School Ladies and Gents (Crowley)
Crowley split its mascot down gender lines decades ago and never looked back. Boys teams compete as the Gents, girls teams as the Ladies, a naming convention that Acadia Parish’s own school district confirms still carries down to Crowley Middle School’s “Junior Ladies and Gents.” It’s a simple system, but no other Louisiana school has replicated it.
Union Parish Farmers (Farmerville)
Few mascots wear their community’s identity as plainly as Union Parish’s. The Farmers name leans directly into Farmerville’s agricultural roots, and the program has backed it up on the field, winning state championships in 2001 and 2013. It’s a mascot built for a town where the school and the surrounding farmland are practically the same conversation.
Ascension Episcopal Blue Gators (Lafayette/Youngsville)
Gators are common in high school sports; more than 100 schools nationwide claim the name. Blue Gators, though, belong to exactly one program, according to the LHSAA’s own school directory: Ascension Episcopal in Lafayette Parish.
The color swap is a small tweak with a big payoff, giving one of Acadiana’s own private schools a mascot nobody else in the country can print on a jersey.
Metairie Park Country Day Cajuns (Metairie)
The University of Louisiana at Lafayette isn’t the only school in the state with Cajuns in its identity, but at the high school level, Metairie Park Country Day has the name to itself, per Crescent City Sports’ New Orleans-area school listings. Situated between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, the school leans into the same Acadian heritage that defines so much of south Louisiana, just without UL’s fiercer “Ragin’” branding.
Leesville Wampus Cats (Leesville)
The Wampus Cat draws from Southern and Appalachian folklore, most often described as a half-mountain-cat, half-woman spirit said to spy on hunters from the treeline. Leesville High School has carried the name for generations, and the community leaned into that history just last week: the school held its first-ever “Meet the Wampus Cats” event on Aug. 1, premiering a new documentary on the program’s football history with Pro Football Hall of Famer and Leesville alum Kevin Mawae on hand to meet the current roster.
Sulphur Golden Tors (Sulphur)
Officially, Sulphur High School’s teams are the Golden Tornado, but decades of shorthand turned that into the Golden Tors, and the abbreviation stuck hard enough to become the identity itself. Plenty of Louisiana schools go by Golden Tornado in full; Sulphur is the only one that goes by Tors.
Additional Notable Mentions
A few more Louisiana schools deserve a nod for mascots that don’t show up anywhere else in the country, according to Sports Illustrated High School’s rundown of the state’s most unique nicknames: McDonogh 35’s Roneagle in New Orleans, an all-iron mythical bird built to outmatch any real eagle; New Orleans Charter Science and Mathematics’ Nautilus, drawn from the ocean-dwelling mollusk’s Golden Ratio shell; and Isidore Newman’s Greenie Gators in New Orleans, the alma mater of Peyton, Cooper, Eli and Arch Manning.
You May Also Like...
