Cast vote for Dixie mascot

ST. GEORGE — Poor Rodney Rebel knows a thing or two about rejection.

Dixie State College dumped the Confederate soldier-turned-Indiana-Jones-type mascot several years ago and won't consider bringing him back in its search for a new mascot.

In fact, as long as the mascot is not Rodney Rebel, or some other human-based character, the college mascot selection committee is open to a wide array of concepts.

"Once people know it's not the 'Rebel' part that we're trying to change, then they're on board with it," said Phil Alletto, Dixie State College vice president of student services and a member of the mascot selection committee.

"We just want to choose a new mascot. There are a lot of mascot names that sound funny until you've lived with them for a while. Eventually, with tradition and time, you get used to them," he added.

Anyone interested in voting for the new Dixie State College mascot can do so on the college Web site at www.dixie.edu. Voters are asked to select their top three choices from a list of 25 suggestions, and to identify whether they're alumni, a current student, faculty or staff member, or a resident of the community.

Alletto said more than 2,500 individual votes have been cast on the college Web site since Feb. 3. Vote totals will be gathered for a mascot committee meeting Thursday, during which the choices will be whittled down to those with the most votes.

Among the 25 choices facing mascot voters are: a bat, comet or fireball, bulldog, chipmunk, coyote, dinosaur, dragon, Gila monster, ghost or spirit, red-tailed hawk, raccoon, roadrunner, rock and wolf.

Other choices include: a bear, bobcat, bull/longhorn, crow, desert hare, horse, lizard, mountain lion/panther, pit bull, rattlesnake and scorpion.

"The coyote, Gila monster, roadrunner and red-tailed hawk are mentioned most often," Alletto said. "People talk about the Dixie spirit, so the notion of using a spirit for the mascot is one idea. The bulldog isn't very popular."

When the mascot committee first began soliciting ideas, there was one concept among the 150 suggestions that the group thought was really weird, Alletto said.

"Someone said since we had the endangered desert tortoise as a mascot suggestion, why don't we include another endangered species like the wounded spine dace minnow," he said. "Boy, can you imagine having a wounded fish for your mascot? We kind of suspect that suggestion came from one of our athletic competitors."