The combined Marcus-Meriden-Cleghorn/Remsen-Union High School will be called… MMCRU. I thought there could have been a concession to Remsen-Union to give it the first part of the name, but overall in Iowa there’s only a handful of two-name/two-part districts where the first town is not the one with the high school. (Among them are Aplington-Parkersburg and Gladbrook-Reinbeck.)
The new nickname will be the Royals, which until now was unique to Colo-NESCO. (Another nickname note: Chris Andringa let me know a few weeks ago that Rock Valley, like Remsen-Union, is also the Rockets, in the sports it doesn’t share with Boyden-Hull.)
The other option for a new name was Northwest, which would have been a vague choice for the multi-county location but only the second geographically correct one in a “quadrant” setup:
- Northeast of Goose Lake has been around a while but is in far east-central Iowa.
- Corning and Villisca combined to form Southwest Valley a few years ago. The valley in question is the Nodaway River, but there’s already a Nodaway Valley, and “West Fork Hundred and Two Valley” is slightly cumbersome.
- The direction for the new Southeast Valley comes from Southeast Webster-Grand, which is in north-central Iowa. It most likely pre-empts any new district actually in southeast Iowa using that, though.
- And, of course, the two “Central” districts discussed in previous blog posts that are located in counties along the Mississippi River.
MMC won a state football championship last week, so it’s going out on a high note. (And also putting an end to a very minor Chris Hassel character on KXNO.)