Comment
3
60
Tweet
0
Print
RSS Feeds

DeMatha Stag wins WTOP's best high school mascot

Thursday - 8/2/2012, 5:02am  ET

dematha
The DeMatha Stag won WTOP's top high school mascot. (Courtesy of DeMatha)

Darci Marchese, wtop.com

WASHINGTON - When it comes to high school mascots, apparently the Stag rules.

The WTOP Top 10 contest has revealed that DeMatha Catholic High School's mascot is No. 1.

To understand the DeMatha stag, WTOP turned to alumni James Brown, who's now a broadcaster with CBS Sports and a special correspondent for CBS News. Brown, or JB as he's affectionately called, had the privilege of playing on DeMatha's basketball team under the leadership of Coach Morgan Wootten.

"I was so thrilled and blessed to play for Coach Wootten," says Brown.

Brown explains that the mascot wasn't a fuzzy creature that ran around the basketball court, instead it was an image on players' jackets or seen on the basketball court.

Brown jokes that many teams have two-legged creatures jumping on trampolines. He says if the stag tried to do the same, "rest assured, the new nickname would be 'stag-nut' as opposed to 'stag.'"

Brown has done his homework on the background of the stag. He says that Trinitarians, the school's religious order which owns and runs the school, came up with the mascot many years ago.

St. John DeMatha from France had a vision that came to him. It was a stag with red and blue antlers. DeMatha's school colors are red and blue, so it adopted the stag as its mascot.

The stag is a large deer, native to Europe, Asia, and northwestern Africa. The red deer has an extremely aggressive nature.

Brown says he was proud to be a part of the Stags and has many great memories on DeMatha's basketball team. He loves to recall when his team was playing a powerhouse opponent in Long Island, N.Y. and was trailing the entire game. He says Wootten told team members, with 30 seconds left, that they had a chance, saying the other team is complacent so they could pull off a win. He says the coach outlined every play second-by-second and the team carried it out and claimed a victory.

Coach Wootten was a "great motivator and never gave up, never," says Brown.

Brown also says he's realized that his mascot is truly original.

"You know of all the mascots I've seen in all my years in covering sports, they've all been of the two-legged variety."

Here's how all of the mascots did in WTOP's top 10:

  1. DeMatha Stags
  2. Gonzaga Purple Eagles
  3. Annandale Atoms
  4. Clarksburg Coyotes
  5. Herndon Hornets
  6. Bowie Bulldogs
  7. Woodrow Wilson Tigers
  8. Chantilly Chargers
  9. Tie: Briar Woods Falcons and Bethesda-Chevy Chase Barons

Voting for WTOP's Top 10 was open to WTOP listeners, and was conducted through WTOP.com and the WTOP Facebook page.

Related Stories:

Follow WTOP on Twitter.

(Copyright 2012 by WTOP. All Rights Reserved.)

Tags: dematha,  morgan wootten,  dematha catholic high school,  darci marchese