New School, New Nickname For Meadowdale Mavericks

It's a Ford car your grandmother might have driven; the call signal of your favorite hot-shot pilot from "Top Gun"; the mascot for the lowly NBA team the Sonics have struggled against, and an old television series starring James Garner.

It's also the new nickname for Meadowdale High School. Meadowdale students, staff and community members have voted to change the school's nickname from Chiefs to Mavericks.

Meadowdale Principal Norm Hoffman said the change has been a long time coming.

"We knew that certain segments of the student constituent were bothered by the Native American mascot, and there had been a lot of questions in the past few years as to whether the Chiefs has been an inappropriate nickname," he said. "And so as we prepared to move from the old high school into a brand new facility, students, staff and community members discussed the issue and decided that if there ever was an appropriate time to make a change in the mascot name, that this would be the time to do it."

The new nickname was officially adopted last week as Meadowdale moved into its new building, only a few hundred yards away from its old spot on 168th Avenue Southwest.

Hoffman said Meadowdale students proposed as many as 40 nicknames. Through several votes, the choices were narrowed down to Mavericks and Grizzlies. Hoffman said Mavericks was picked "within a couple votes."

Maverick is defined in Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary as "an unbranded range animal (esp. a motherless calf)" and "an independent individual who refuses to conform to his group."