Best high school mascot in Minnesota: Top 10 candidates

From Blackjacks to Agates to Winhawks, meet the best high school mascots in Minnesota

Yes, it's Minnesota high school football playoff season.

But any Awesome Blossom or Superlark in the state will tell you it's always high school mascot season.

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 Minnesota poll will post Oct. 28 on highschool.si.com and stay open through Nov. 4.

Vote: Which is the best high school mascot in Minnesota?

Here are the top 10 high school mascots in Minnesota:

Blooming Prairie Awesome Blossoms

The Awesome Blossoms are no stranger to winning athletic or mascot competitions. Blooming Prairie has been the Blossoms since the early 1900s, and they added an "Awesome" in the ‘60s.

Dawson-Boyd Blackjacks

Every athlete in every sport at Dawson-Boyd High School has to wear No. 21. Just kidding. These Blackjacks are referring to the steely-eyed black jackrabbit in the school’s logo.

Grand Meadow Superlarks

Once called the Meadowlarks, they switched to the Superlarks in the 1970s to sound tougher, and it’s worked. As athletic director Gary Sloan told KIMT3 Sports in 2020, “It’s basically an eagle on steroids or a lark on steroids, or something like that.”

Jordan Hubmen & Jaguars & Panthers

All right, buckle up for this one. In the 1940s newspapers began calling Jordan’s boys sports teams the Hubmen, but no one really knows why. In the 1970s, the school’s first girls volleyball team formed, and they understandably didn’t want to be called Hubmen. They asked to be Jaguars, and that stuck in all girls sports. In 1990, the Scott West Panthers joined the fray as a Jordan/Belle Plaine co-op. If you find another high school out there with three nicknames, please let us know.

McGregor Mercuries

The only Mercuries in the country, McGregor changed the temperature of the high school sports scene by naming its teams after the Roman god of speed.

Moorhead Spuds

Moorhead’s teams have been called the Spuds for over 100 years. The name started being used in the late 1910s or early 1920s, inspired by at least one Moorhead school’s site atop a former potato field. The school's mascot is a big smiling potato named Spuddy.

Roosevelt Teddies

There are a whole bunch of Roosevelt high schools in the U.S., and most are nicknamed the Rough Riders or the Roughriders. But Minneapolis has the only Roosevelt Teddies.

Sauk Centre Mainstreeters

Sauk Centre is the birthplace of author Sinclair Lewis, and the town inspired his fictional Gopher Prairie, the setting of Lewis' 1920 novel “Main Street.” The high school chose the mascot Mainstreeters in a nod to the novel and novelist.

Two Harbors Agates

An agate crystal forms within the cavities of other rocks in acidic to neutral environments — such as the shores of Lake Superior, where the town of Two Harbors is located.

Winona Winhawks

There’s no such thing as a winhawk in the wild, but Winhawks are everywhere in the wilds of Winona, and Herky the Winhawk is the school’s spirited mascot. So what is a winhawk? Simple: A hawk that wins.

Not-former-president Lyndon Johnson holds one of his many more-than-30-pound agates at his Minnesota home in 2019 / Dave Schwarz, St. Cloud Times via Imagn Content Services

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