Best high school mascot in West Virginia: Top 5 candidates

From Dots to Applemen, meet the best high school mascots in West Virginia

West Virginia offers an interesting art lesson when it comes to high school mascots.

Dots and Applemen can look a lot alike with the right amount of muscles.

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 past couple of months we've been going from Alabama through Wyoming featuring each state's best high school mascots, and then giving readers a chance to vote for their favorite. Our West Virginia poll posted Nov. 30 on highschool.si.com and will stay open through Dec. 7:

Vote: Which is the best high school mascot in West Virginia?

Here are the top five high school mascots in West Virginia:

Clay-Battelle Cee Bees

If every hyphenated school used its initials as its nickname, there’d be a whole lot more competitors with the Eagles and Tigers as the most common team name. But they don’t, so the Cee Bees stand out.

Madonna Blue Dons

A whole bunch of Dons exist in the high school sports world, but in the spirit of Madonna herself, these are the most colorful of the bunch. 

Man Hillbillies

Several high schools in the U.S. go by the Hillbillies, but no city name makes it work quite like Man, West Virginia.

Musselman Applemen

Musselman High School is named for Mr. and Mrs. C.H. Musselman, who owned and operated the Musselman apple processing plant that made Musselman's Applesauce. The school mascot changed from the Dragons to the Applemen in 1951 to honor the Musselman family. The physical mascot is a Red Delicious Apple, and the school newspaper is called The Cider Press.

Poca Dots

On Friday nights, you can find a mean-looking red dot with arms and legs patrolling the sidelines for Poca. The school received its fitting nickname nearly a century ago from a local reporter, and it's stuck ever since.

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