KNOX — Choose wisely or your team’s name could be mud

Jack Knox once played softball with The Kamloops News Newshounds, and now resides in Victoria, where he’s a team player with the Times Colonist. 

COLUMN — Good morning, class. Today’s lesson: how to name a team.

Washington Redskins, take notes.

Greater Victoria got its newest sports name recently, the Royal Bay Ravens being chosen for the high school due to open in Colwood this fall.

Not bad. Pleasantly alliterative and regionally appropriate (we’ve got ravens here). Not as creative as the Macon Whoopee of the old Central Hockey League, or the Fighting Artichokes of Arizona’s Scottsdale Community College, but easier for headline writers (ed. note: thank you) and mascot designers.

Deciding what to call a team is a delicate business. This doesn’t just apply to the NFL’s Redskins, a name now deemed so objectionable that many U.S. newspapers, including the New York Daily News and Seattle Times, refuse to use it in game stories.

Backfires abound. The Toronto Raptors name seemed as outdated as Pogs not long after the Jurassic Park-inspired dinosaur craze passed. Ditto for the equally faddish Anaheim Mighty Ducks, a Disney-owned team with a Disney-movie moniker. In the 1990s, the owner of Washington’s basketball franchise decided Bullets was no longer right for a city ravaged by violent crime, so changed it to Wizards. Baseball’s Devil Rays became the supposedly less-satanic Rays. Linguists are still holding out for the Maple Leafs to become Maple Leaves, but that’s almost as unlikely as Toronto winning the cup.

Happily, when the Royal Bay Ravens soared, it was with a flight plan. The Sooke district has a name-selection process that involves students, teachers, parents and members of the community, with the principal having the final word on a committee’s recommendation.

There are rules. No filching other schools’ nicknames (all the tweens wanted Dragons during the Harry Potter boom). Nothing nasty that conflicts with the school’s values (“We’re not going to be the Calgary Hitmen,” notes district superintendent Jim Cambridge). No corporate names (remember the Bad News Bears, sponsored by Chico’s Bail Bonds?)

Gender and cultural issues are taken into account. Nicknames and mascots tied to a specific cultural group cannot be adopted without consultation with that group, whether there are perceived negative connotations or not. “We have to be at the forefront of people’s sensitivities around preferences,” Cambridge says.

It’s not always easy to keep up to moving goalposts, though. What seems appropriate one day — smoking in airplanes, the strap, hipster man buns — can be anachronistic the next. Note that Belmont Secondary’s boys were called Braves and the girls Tomahawks until 2000, when someone looked at the calendar and realized it wasn’t 1950.

A Times Colonist editorial at that time cheered the change, though not because it found the Braves and Tomahawks to be any more offensive or inappropriate than all the cartoonish Highlanders and Vikings running around high school gyms in their more-Hollywood-than-history tartans and horned helmets. No, the editorial just wanted names that reflected something representative of a school or its area: Edmonton Oilers, Prince Rupert Rainmakers, even our own Salmon Kings.

UVic blew a golden opportunity a quarter century ago when it dropped Vikings (no local relevance) and Vikettes (any name ending in “ettes” or starting in “Lady” is a non-starter) but replaced them with Vikes, a meaningless invention that sounds as though it should get excellent fuel economy. Couldn’t they have picked something more indicative of Victoria, like Galloping Gardeners or Thundering Bureaucrats?

You can only adopt such a local name when a team stays put, though. The Flames made sense for Atlanta and the Lakers for Minnesota, but should have rebranded when they moved to Calgary and Los Angeles respectively — in the same way the Cougars morphed into the Red Wings after the players left Victoria for Detroit in the 1920s.

There has to be room for quirkiness. Can’t help but have a soft spot for the old Victoria Salsa (nothing says Victoria like a Mexican condiment) owned by the same people who had Taco Time, or for the Castor Raiders (say it quickly) in Ed Bain’s Alberta cattle-country hometown.

And don’t forget those schools with multiple names. Most Oak Bay High teams are called Bays, but at some point the basketball girls forged their own identity as Breakers, the rugby guys became Barbarians and then the volleyball team riffed on that with Barbers. (The school mascot, Nutty the acorn, must have to keep a cheat sheet to keep them straight.)

Vic High does something similar with its Totems, Tikis, Titans, Tigers and Tsasquatches.

Some of the best names don’t actually exist at all. In 1995, a CBC Radio contest in which listeners were invited to invent team names produced the Nitinat Paddywhacks, Port Simpson Homers, Port Melon Collies and both the Metchosin Ones and the Metchosin Few.

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