Sports fans and the political cognoscenti are well aware of the controversy rending the town of Killingly.

From 1939 until 2019, the Killingly High School teams were known as the Redmen. But last year, under pressure from several Native American tribes, the school board voted to adopt a new mascot, the Red Hawks.

Students and faculty generally accepted the change, but voters did not. Republicans running for the school board vowed to rescue the historical mascot. In November, the party took the majority on the board.

This January, in a contentious five-hour meeting, the board rescinded the new name and mandated the return of the Redmen.

This is America, so the issue is probably not resolved. For one thing, no one has opined on whether female teams should be called the Redwomen. For another, there’s talk in Hartford of a bill to prohibit certain categories of team names.

And that’s where New London comes in.

New London High School has a respectable mascot: the Whaler. It reflects the historical foundation of the city’s glorious past, and it acknowledges the courage and fortitude of those who sailed the seas when ships were made of wood and men were made of steel and nothing was made of plastic.

And if there were any female whalers, they are included in that delightfully gender-neutral term.

So everybody should be happy, right?

Well, not necessarily, for, as stated above, this is America. Sooner or later someone’s going to pipe up about the poor whales. Do the high school teams want to be known as the type to skewer their fellow mammals for their oil and spermaceti?

We don’t need to answer that question quite yet. But it wouldn’t hurt to have a back-up mascot — one that inflicts fear on its opponents yet reflects today’s sensitivities.

The Nutmeg State’s usual perpetrators of ferocity — sharks, bears, wolves, rattlesnakes, falcons, eagles, wildcats, pirates, or, for that matter, red hawks and whales — just aren’t cutting it these days. Their death tolls don’t even reach the single digits. Opposing teams just don’t take them seriously anymore.

It’s tempting to enlist the second-most dangerous animal in Connecticut — the featherless biped. They’ve been running rampant across the state, wrecking cars, felling forests, casting their waste into the public air supply, making horrific noises in the night, breeding willy-nilly and electing Redmen backers to boards of education.

But featherless bipeds are also a sensitive bunch, and not without reason. They have personal flaws, phobias, foibles, funny bones, faint hearts, fallibilities, fecklessness, foot fungus, fusspottedness, futilitarianism, pathological frugality, philosophical tendencies, and just about every other F-word in the dictionary other than feathers.

In other words, we’d best just leave them alone.

But there’s a more ferocious animal that is very much indigenous to our state. Everyone fears it, and innumerable Nutmeggers have been attacked by it. They are especially rampant on the southeast coast where whalers once roamed. They cause a gasp of horror whenever they are found. No team wants to trot out onto a field to face them.

Yes, that ferocious, native American beast is that tiny-weeny bloodsucker Ixodes ricinus, known among the cognoscenti as the deer tick.

I’m not suggesting that the New London Deer Ticks is necessarily the best team name, but maybe we should snag it while it’s still available.

Glenn Alan Cheney is managing editor of New London Librarium and the author or translator of more than 40 books. He can be reached at glenn@cheneybooks.com.

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