Shady Side nickname changed to Bulldogs
WPIAL school latest to end Native-American imagery in its mascot
After spending almost six months searching for a new nickname, Shady Side Academy announced Monday that its new name is Bulldogs, effective immediately.
The school’s athletic teams had been known as the Indians since their inception, but the Shady Side Academy board of trustees voted unanimously July 1 to discontinue the use of the Indians nickname . Shady Side Academy revealed the new mascot via a 41-second video posted on its official YouTube page.
Gene Deal is in his final year as the Shady Side Academy athletic director, and he’s fully embracing the change after 30 years on the job under the Indians moniker.
“I’m excited for the kids and the coaches and the parents,” Deal said. “It’ll be great for everybody. I think it’ll develop a whole new sense of school spirit.”
Shady Side Academy’s decision to drop the Indians as the school mascot came amidst a swarm of national backlash against sports teams using Native-American imagery in their nicknames. Most notably, the Washington Redskins changed their name to the Washington Football Team ahead of the 2020 season after decades of public outcry.
According to a letter sent out by board of trustees chair Jon Kamin in July, the board decided that “a significant portion of our community feels that it cannot embrace” the Indians name or mascot.
To begin the process of choosing a new mascot, the school implemented a 20-person Mascot Search
Committee, composed of students, alumni, coaches, faculty, staff and parents.
The committee, chaired by 1991 graduate Bob Grandizio and 1998 graduate Jamie Scott, encouraged community members to submit mascot suggestions via an online survey. After receiving more than 600 suggestions, the committee then narrowed down the list to 22 semifinalists, followed by another online survey which pared the list to five.
“It took a while, but I give all the credit to Bobby Grandizio, my former baseball coach, and Jamie Scott, director of alumni development — they did a great job on this committee,” Deal said. “The students were heavily involved. I think they did a good job. A nice representation of the community.”
The five mascots submitted for consideration to the board of trustees were the Bulldogs, Lions, Owls, Hawks and Wolfpack. After deliberating for more than two hours, the board voted to officially adopt the Bulldogs as the school’s new mascot on Thursday, Dec. 17.
Skyy Moore is a 2019 graduate of Shady Side Academy who starred as a dual-threat quarterback at the school and is now a dynamic sophomore receiver at Western Michigan. He said that it will be a bit strange getting used to his alma mater’s new nickname, but he fully understands why it had to happen.
“I like Wolfpack. If I was still in school, I probably would have picked Wolfpack,” Moore said. “I mean, Bulldogs is cool. I think them being the Indians, it’s just not going to sound right. But the Bulldogs will definitely do the job for now.”
Now that it has decided on its new nickname, the next step in the rebranding process for Shady Side Academy is to design a new logo, which it hopes to have completed by the end of the 2020-21 school year.
“I think by June we’ll have the logo and the branding out and we’ll put it all together and hopefully get it on some new uniforms to give it a look,” Deal said. “Maybe that will be the last thing I do is get a few new uniforms.”
Although Shady Side Academy has distanced itself from the controversial mascot and nickname, others have yet to follow suit.
Despite the increased push-back against Native American imagery in sports, “Indians” remains the most commonly used nickname among the more than 120 member schools in the WPIAL. North Hills, Penn Hills, Peters Township and West Allegheny still use the Indians as their mascot, and Indiana uses the Little Indians.
“I don’t want to speak for other schools,” Deal said. “I think just for our school, it was the right timing and the right thing for us to do.”