Though it’s a nickname that’s been used by some teams for a while, the Charging Dragons moniker received the official blessing of the Litchfield School Board Monday night.
The board voted unanimously to use the nickname for any sports teams in which Litchfield is in a cooperative agreement with the Dassel-Cokato School District.
That means boys and girls hockey, boys swimming and diving, and wrestling.
Again, the nickname isn’t really anything new. Administrators and coaches from Litchfield and Dassel-Cokato chose a logo in 2019 that aimed to connect all of their co-op sports team. The stylized logo initially incorporated the letters “DLC” to acknowledge both districts.
But the logo exploration also included a proposal that used “DLC,” with “DC” in blue and “L” in green, encircled by what looks like a flash of lightning or electrical charge on one side and a dragon’s tail on the other. That wasn’t chosen as a formal logo immediately, however, and it was decided that Dragons would remain the nickname for the hockey teams, because Litchfield was the host school to the program.
Brown told Litchfield School Board members at the time that “we leaned away from that (logo) because we don’t know what our mascot is going to be.” But he also said that an informal survey of parents and students indicated “Charging Dragons” was a popular possibility for a mascot and nickname.
Ever since the schools combined wrestling programs for the 2021-2022 school year, the Charging Dragons nickname and logo has grown in popularity and use.
“This mascot has been associated with all of our coops but has never become official,” Activities Director Justin Brown wrote in a memo to the school board. The nickname, he said, already had approval of the Dassel-Cokato administration.
Board member Greg Mathews asked what would happen if the cooperatives were to end, saying he hoped “we would return to our original Dragon.”
Brown said the nickname and logo will be used “only in the co-ops” of hockey, wrestling and boys swimming and diving.
“Parents have been using it for years,” Brown said of the Charging Dragons moniker.
