Why is there still a Vienna Little League team called the Rebels?
South Burlington High School is currently shut down because:
A) students organized a successful effort to change the mascot name from the “Rebels” and
B) this made idiots mad and they’ve spent the past three days phoning in death threats.
This got me wondering whether Vienna Little League Baseball still had a team called the Rebels, as they did when I was playing and umpiring back in the early 90s. Turns out they do! And in what I’m sure is a delightful coincidence, they’re in the “South” division. LOL!
This team name always confused me as a little leaguer (though not enough to prevent me from focusing during my single A Braves team winning the championship game 29–2) because all the other teams in the “majors” were actual baseball teams like the Orioles and Pirates who got to wear the team’s sweet official hats while the Rebels had to wear some crappy-ass bootleg looking ones. You know in a movie where where the studio didn’t shell out money for actual team licenses and you get teams called the Sharks or the Cheetahs? That’s what they looked like.
There are photos of the team as far back as the 60s, so it’s obviously still around because of the dreaded ‘tradition’ argument that is currently being used by the aforementioned dipshits up here in Vermont (Indeed, the Rebel Tradition is very strong here, forty miles from the Canadian border). But as any DC resident who’s been subjected to Daniel Snyder’s Revolting Face o’ Failure™ for the past 25 years, tradition is clearly the absolute worst reason to keep a team name going: You’re valuing your own vaguely happy nostalgia (I liked singing Hail to the Redskins with my grandfather!) over the extremely negative feelings they may invoke in someone else (Rebels were down with enslaving my grandfather…)
Vienna is 75% white, 3% black as of the last census btw.
The last time I drove down to Charlottesville in late 2015, I was surprised to see at least two confederate flags, either displayed on property along route 29 or in cars along the way. I don’t remember if they were there while I was in college and I just didn’t notice or I was just more attuned to them because they’d been in the news lately. But they were a jarring disgrace, just an hour down the road from Vienna. Having 12 year olds play on a team called the Rebels in Robert E. Lee’s home state has no other connotation than reminding us of the bums who got their asses handed to them in the civil war. It’s just one step removed from playing with that flag patch on their uniforms.
I guess my point is, the little league board of directors contact info is readily available, is this worth making a fuss about? Just for fun?
