Sugarbeeters a distant third in national mascot contest

For a small north-central Montana town to receive a million votes in a national contest may be an impressive total, but with one day to go, it looks like that won't be enough to lift the Chinook Sugarbeeters to a national championship.

This morning, the Sugarbeeters had received just less than a million votes in USA Today High School Sports' Best Mascot Contest, putting them in a distant third in the contest, with about 27 million votes cast.

The Sugarbeeters trailed the Orphans of Centralia, Ill., which had almost 16 million votes, and the Carbon County Dinos of Price, Utah, which had more than 9 million.

The Sugarbeeters took their name after the then-Chinook High School Tigers won the 1929 Montana state basketball championship. The owners of the local sugar beet processing plant, then a mainstay of the Blaine County economy, helped pay the team's way to a national competition in Chicago.

The Chinook High School team — which won games in Chicago but did not win the championship — took the name Sugarbeeters to honor the donors.

USA Today High School Sports started this year's contest by selecting five teams from each state and the District of Columbia to compete in the first round of the contest.

In that round, the Sugarbeeters defeated the Nashua High School Porcupines, the North Toole County High School Rangers from Sunburst, the Powell County High School Wardens from Deer Lodge, and the Whitewater High School Penguins.

Chinook then competed against the other winning high schools from the contest's Region 5, which also included Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas.

The Greenbacks of Pratt High School in Pratt, Kan., took an early lead, but the Beeters were edging them toward the originally scheduled close of the round. When traffic started overloading the USA Today servers, the publication announced it was extending the voting.

Last week during that extension, the Sugarbeeters closed and passed the Greenbacks and won with 2,767,229 votes, and the Pratt mascot took second with 2,442,257.

The contest is scheduled to end at 1 p.m. Mountain Time Wednesday. The voting is taken online at http://contest.usatodayhss.com/vote/mascot/final .