The origins behind North Jersey's wackiest HS sports nicknames
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At North Jersey high schools, there’s often an intriguing backstory.
Not all mascots are unique – NJSIAA membership has 16 “Panther” schools, including four in Bergen County – but many are germane to the communities where they are located.
Some are simply a play on the name of the school: Holy Angels Angels, Northern Highlands Highlanders, Ramsey Rams and the like.
Some use colors to differentiate from other programs, like the various Raiders: Red at Cliffside Park and Maroon at Dwight Morrow (FYI, the “Green” used for Ramapo in a misnomer). For others, a color has become the nickname, with the Ridgefield Park Scarlets and Ridgewood Maroons as prime examples.
Then, there are several which are just wacky.
NorthJersey.com conducted a poll in 2018 to see which Bergen/Passaic school nickname captured fans’ fancy the most. It’s time to look back on which teams led the list… and see if they can stand up to challengers from surrounding counties in northern New Jersey.
1. Hasbrouck Heights Aviators
This was the winner of the 2018 poll with 44.6 percent of the vote, more than 30 percent ahead of the field.
The school calls its teams the Aviators due to its closeness to Teterboro Airport – and Teterboro sends the students in its minuscule district to Hasbrouck Heights. The airport lies approximately one block away from the Aviators’ Depken Field, and the logo font is stylized after the New York Jets’ logo.
2. Mahwah Thunderbirds
Mahwah High School opened in 1959, four years after the township’s Ford assembly plant (1955-80), which was located two miles to the north. Ford Motor Co. made a donation to the school’s construction, and since the Thunderbird was one of the cars produced at the plant, the sports teams adopted an automotive namesake.
3. Eastside Ghosts
The current Eastside High School is located near the former site of Sandy Hill Cemetery. The bodies buried there were removed before the school opened in 1925, and the so-called “Mighty Ghosts” – a.k.a. the “Undertakers” in some 1920s/30s newspaper articles – carry on their legacy. Sandy Hill is also home to Bauerle Field, where the Ghosts play football and soccer.
4. Fair Lawn Cutters
This nickname may seem to be a pun related to “cutting the lawn,” but it is not. It was coined by a local newspaper during the school’s inaugural football season in 1943. A few players on the team were suspended for the first half of a game after cutting class. They returned for the second half, helped Fair Lawn rally from 12-0 down to a 13-12 win, and a headline the following day referenced the “Cutters’ come back” victory.
5. Don Bosco Ironmen
The Ramsey non-public is the only school in the state with this nickname (although the Trenton Catholic Iron Mikes come close). According to the school website, the word is used as an acronym for Don Bosco’s “honor code”, which encourages students to have Integrity, Respect, Optimism, (act) Naturally, Mental focus, Empathy and Noble intentions.
6. Garfield Boilermakers
The school shares a nickname with Purdue University, which pays homage to the locomotive builders in West Lafayette, Indiana. Garfield has been home to many industries, and although railroad fabrication was not among them, local factories relied on the rails as supply lines. The city’s Spring Tank filled the boilers of locomotives on the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad for many years.
7. Fort Lee Bridgemen
The school’s athletes are referred to as the Bridgemen because of the school’s proximity to the George Washington Bridge. According to school representatives, there is no official female variant, so the otherwise contradictory term “Lady Bridgemen” is acceptable.
8. Hawthorne Christian Defenders
The small non-public on Route 208 North brings a different spin to “defense first.” Its nickname refers to the school’s goal to have students be defenders of their Christian faith. Athletics-wise, the mascot proved most appropriate in Fall 2015, when the boys soccer team notched eight shutouts and won the school’s first Passaic County title in any sport.
9. Teaneck Highwaymen/women
The “Castle on a Hill,” as the school building is colloquially known, sits adjacent to a state highway, Route 4. The logo is an outline of a horse-mounted highwayman, i.e. the type of robber that victimized British travelers in the 17th-19th centuries.
Essex County: Verona Hillbillies, West Side Roughriders
Essex County features two noteworthy contenders:
West Side of Newark is home to the Roughriders, though early-20th century articles typically printed it as “Rough Riders”. The two-word spelling was used for Theodore Roosevelt’s cavalry regiment of the same name, which fought in the Spanish-American War. Roosevelt died six years before West Side’s 1925 opening, and Paramount Pictures’ film The Rough Riders opened two years after the school did.
Verona, according to mascotdb.com, is one of only four high schools in the nation to go by “Hillbillies.” Local historian Jack Wickham has posited the name comes from the school’s location amid the hills of the Watchung Mountains, while there is also speculation that there once was a so-called “Hillbilly” section of town.
Warren County: Belvidere County Seaters, Phillipsburg Stateliners, Warren Hills Blue Streaks
Warren County has just five public schools but a high percentage of unique nicknames:
- Belvidere is the county seat, so its athletes are County Seaters. The logo depicts a raccoon, which no other Garden State school uses as a mascot, either.
- Phillipsburg lies on the New Jersey/Pennsylvania state line, so its teams are the Stateliners (’Liners for short).
- Warren Hills opened in 1967 as a regional successor to Washington High School and carried over the nickname, Blue Streaks. Yearbooks and news articles as far back as the 1930s and ’40s use the moniker, and the search for its origin continues.
Morris County: Madison Dodgers
Several Morris County schools share nicknames with pro sports teams, but one is coincidental:
- The Madison Dodgers have no connections to any baseball teams. Similar to Mahwah, their name traces its roots to a donor. Rockefeller Standard Oil heiress Geraldine Dodge gave the borough land for a park that featured the Madison football team’s first home: Dodge Field. Per the school’s media website, that gave birth to the “Dodgers.”
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: The origins behind North Jersey's wackiest HS sports nicknames