Since as long as I could remember, I was a fan of the University of North Dakota's hockey team. Admittedly, it was almost solely because I was young, and because I thought their Kelly green, black, and white color scheme was absolutely magical on the hockey teams jerseys. It didn't matter that my parents were alumni of the hated rival, the University of Minnesota. If anything, it made it more interesting: Gophers-Sioux hockey games became somewhat of a friendly rivalry in my family as a result. Thus, looking into UND became somewhat of a no-brainer.
However, my freshman year was the same year the NCAA forced UND to retire the Fighting Sioux nickname, much to the chagrin of the student body. It was announced that after a period of time without a nickname, UND would vote on a new nickname to replace the Sioux, leading us to where we are today. As of a few days ago, we have three possible nicknames; The Fighting Hawks, The Rough Riders, and the NoDaks. The winner will be decided by a runoff vote between the three. While I'm not writing to defend the NCAA or people opposed to the name change, I feel I need to get some things off my chest.
My problem with UND's nickname situation isn't that I don't want to move on from the Fighting Sioux; I realize that point has long passed. My problem with it is that the remaining three runoff names are god awful and don't do justice to the university. Let's be real for a second; whether or not you supported the Fighting Sioux nickname, one thing was undeniable: It was unique to the University of North Dakota. Nobody else in the entire country was the Fighting Sioux, just UND. How many schools can say that? Not only that, but the logo was, objectively speaking, well known for being one of the most well designed logos in college hockey, if not college sports in general. Now, this isn't supposed to sound like an argument to bring back the Fighting Sioux nickname; rather, it's just illustrating how large of shoes the new nickname has to fill.
The three remaining nicknames just don't cut it. Fighting Hawks is horribly, terribly generic. RoughRiders is already taken by Red River High School AND a USHL team threatening a lawsuit, not to mention that Teddy Roosevelt didn't actually pass through North Dakota. And NoDaks? I think it's the dumbest and vaguest nickname of them all. What the hell is a NoDak anyways? A citizen of North Dakota? That's not a terribly intimidating sports mascot, no matter how lenient gun laws here are. Plus, it's only two letters away from NoDicks, which is just giving opposing fan sections an easy, crude, and juvenile chant to mock UND.
All of this is why I'm abstaining from voting in the next round. I really just don't care anymore. The whole process has just been slow and messy. No matter what's chosen, the new nickname is going to be ignored, if not outright rejected by the student body for quite a few years, and even then it'll be decades before people stop yelling "Sioux!" during the National Anthem. Perhaps it's just my pessimistic outlook shining through, but quite frankly I don't think that the effort to support either side is worth it.
