Welcome to the collective, Turners. In adopting the Thunder mascot for Turners Falls High School, the Gill-Montague Regonal School Committee has placed its sports teams in a wider phenomenon in the world of sports: the increasing prevalence of team names that are collectives, rather than pluralized mascots. Like the Oklahoma City basketball franchise that shares its name, Turners Falls will now puzzle over what to call its individual players. Is each one a Thunder? Or are they only the Thunder together?
It’s not unfamiliar these days. Basketball also has the Jazz and the Heat. Major League Soccer has the Revolution, United, the Crew, Dynamo, Impact, Galaxy and a bunch of FC’s. Not so much in baseball and football, although arguably, the Red Sox are a collective. Individual players are not single socks, after all. (Don’t get me started on my rant about how Red Sox players wear long pants that don’t show their socks.)
If you ask any sportswriter, they’ll tell you about the linguistic two-stepping you have to do in dealing with collective nouns. A team, after all, is singular, even though we like to refer to what happens in a game by what players do. In other words, a team takes an “it” for a pronoun, not a “they.” But players can take a “they.” Did your team win last night? Yes, it did. If you want to say “they,” you’d better be sure you get a plural antecedent in there.
One of the things that sports struggle with these days is the tension between individual talent and team cohesion. Can LeBron James get to the NBA finals again carrying the Cavaliers – heck, the whole metropolitan area of Cleveland – on his back? In the early days of sports, the idea of teams was meant to promote civic or school pride. That’s why the mascot issue strikes such a nerve, after all, because it has to do with community identity.
While a mascot that has been around a long time has an undeniable appeal – it is important for a community to be connected to its history – there is something to be said for the idea of a collective. It suggests that the individual works for the good of the whole, the team. We win when the team wins. As coaches are fond of saying, there is no “I” in team.
As the coach of a high school tennis team, I’ve done some thinking about what it means to play an individual sport in a team setting. In high school tennis, an individual player can win, even when his or her team loses. Conversely, a team can lose, while a player wins. This can lead to mixed feelings on the bus ride home. Citing the French Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, I’ve told them: if we win three matches out of five, we win. We win when the team wins.
So, coaches, players and fans now loudly proclaiming yourselves Thunder, we salute you. And by we, I mean those of us associated with the other high school with a longstanding collective team name, which would be Greenfield and the Green Wave. Like I’ve seen on the back of a T-shirt, “Stand up, you might just start a wave.”
Andrew Varnon, in addition to coaching boys tennis at Greenfield High School, teaches at Western New England University, and is a poet living in Greenfield.