by Kireem Nam

Have you ever wondered why you’re a huskie and not a husky?

Maybe not. But the truth is, our mascot is a total misspelling. A huskie? Try typing that into Google, and you’ll realize pretty quickly that a “huskie” isn’t real – except for at North.

So, what’s the story behind the misspelling of our mascot? To understand that, we’ll have to do a little more digging on the origins of our dearly-loved Buster.

Let’s start from the very beginning. Our infamous cross-town rivalry with Central? According to Jim Konrad, North’s athletic director and North alumnus, before all that existed we were actually a part of Central. Central students would come to North for freshman and sophomore year, then finish off high school at Central. North didn’t have an official graduating class until 1977.

At this time, our school colors were gold and green. (Can you picture North without its orange and blue?) But once North had its own graduating class, its colors were changed to the ones we have now, and we adopted the husky as our mascot. As for Buster, his name was chosen through a student survey out of several other choices.

Now, for the secret behind the misspelling. Three words: it flows better. If you remember our fight song, there’s that chant at the very end where we spell out “H-U-S-K-I-E-S” before declaring that we’re the best. It was decided that “h-u-s-k-i-e-s” was more rhythmically pleasing that “h-u-s-k-y-s”, so the name stuck.

Never mind that “huskies” is actually the grammatically correct plural form of “husky.”

Whatever the reason behind the spelling of our mascot – whether it flows better in the fight song, or it really was a typo, or maybe it was to prevent us from hearing all those jokes about “husky North students” – it’s not too bad of an outcome. It makes us a bit unique, after all.