Best high school mascot in Illinois: Top 10 candidates

From Appleknockers to Cornjerkers to Wooden Shoes, meet the best high school mascots in Illinois

Not to play favorites or anything, but let's come right out and say that top to bottom, Illinois has the best high school mascot depth in the country.

From unique to clever to gloriously simple to perfectly head-scratching, Illinois has it all at the high school level when it comes to mascots.

SBLive Sports' love for unique mascots with interesting back stories has been well documented.

We've crowned Hodags and Imps the past couple of years in national high school mascot contests, and now we're taking a spin through every state.

Over the next couple of months we'll go from Alabama through Wyoming featuring each state's best high school mascots, and then give readers a chance to vote for their favorite. Our Illinois poll will post Oct. 17 on highschool.si.com and stay open through Oct. 24.

Here are the top 10 high school mascots in Illinois:

Coal City Coalers

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

Cobden Appleknockers

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.

Effingham Flaming Hearts

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.

Freeport and New Berlin Pretzels

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.

Hampshire Whip-Purs

“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).

Hoopeston Area Cornjerkers

"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.

Lake Forest Academy Caxys

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.

Polo Marcos

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

Roxana Shells

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.

Teutopolis Wooden Shoes

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.

(Feature photo by Cody Scanlan/Holland Sentinel / USA Today Network)

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-- Mike Swanson | swanson@scorebooklive.com | @sblivesports