Best high school mascot in Illinois: Top 10 candidates

Coal City has roots in coal mining and Occam’s razor: a philosophical principle that states the simplest explanation is usually the best one.

This seems like a missed opportunity for Cobden to use a corn pun, but the rural town is located in a region rife with apple orchards.

Ada Kepley, the first American woman to graduate from law school, was a resident and proponent of tourism in Effingham. She dubbed the town as the "Heart of America,” and that led to the school’s team name change from the Warriors to the Flaming Hearts. No one is sure where the “Flaming” came from.

These two Illinois schools — about 250 miles apart but both rich with German history — are the only ones in the country called the Pretzels. When they played a baseball game against each other in 2015, “Let the Salt Fly” T-shirts were on sale.

“Whi-Pur” won the school’s mascot contest in the 1940s. The school’s colors were white and purple, so “Whi-Pur” shortened that. At some point it evolved into Whip-Pur to make it look more like a real word, and that became an important part of the original mascot drawing (a cat holding a whip).

"The Sweetcorn Capital of the World" is Hoopeston, Illinois, and a cornjerker is (or was) a farmer who harvested corn. Technology has changed the process of harvesting corn, but the school should never change its nickname.

We know you already know this, but “Caxy" is ancient Greek for “ribbit." In the early 1900s, Aristophanes’ comedy “The Frogs” was the subject of a popular Greek literature class at the school. Thus, the Caxys.

Undoubtedly one of the historically punniest mascot names in the country, right alongside Minnesota’s Roosevelt Teddies.

Originally named for the Shell Oil refinery that opened in town in 1918, Roxana is still called the Shells despite Phillips 66’s acquisition of the refinery in the early 2000s.

The Wooden Shoes got their name from a basketball coach in the 1930s. He wanted to honor the town's German heritage and the lone cobbler in town by calling the Teutopolis teams the Wooden Shoes, and it's stuck ever since. The school's logo is a large T with a wooden shoe crossing it.