The Most Ridiculous High School Mascot Of All Time
Boiling Springs isn’t known for much. The rural Pennsylvania town was once featured on a mid-2000s MTV show, and that’s about it. Hell, I didn’t know much about the town until I moved there at the beginning of my freshmen year.
But if Boling Springs should be known for anything, it’s for having the worst mascot in all of America. Now you might be thinking to yourself, what hellish mascot can it be? Speedy the Geoduck? Artie the Artichoke? No, nothing that cool. We were the Boiling Springs Bubblers. Yeah, you read that right, the Bubblers.
A god damn purple and yellow bubble meant to strike fear in the hearts of opponents across Pennsylvania.
The history of the bubble
The first thing I need you to know is, unlike most Bubblers (that’s what the students called themselves), I didn’t attend the same school district K through 12. I was a military brat, and bounced around the country/world before being slapped down in Boiling Springs, Pennsylvania.
You can imagine my shock and horror the first day I enrolled and was told, “Congrats, you’re now a bubbler.” See, I was coming from Seattle, where bubbler was more associated with a weed-smoking apparatuses, than it was a high-school mascot.
The horror came when I realized what Bubbler meant in Pennsylvania. For the next four years, I would have to be a Bubbler. But it made me wonder, where the hell does a purple and gold bubble mascot come from?
Bubbler origins
The answer isn’t simple. Because no matter who you ask, you’ll get a different answer or shrug of the shoulder. At one point, Boiling Springs High School was the Mustangs. The colors were red, white, and blue. (Strangely enough, the mustangs and those colors were the mascot of my school in Seattle.)
Red, white, and blue, small-town football Fridays, throw in mom’s apple pie, and nothing could have been more American. Until someone came along and fucked things up.
Boiling Springs has a small lake in the middle of the village. Most people would call it a pond, but locals call it a child’s lake. The lake has a bunch of natural hot springs underneath it that make it look like it’s bubbling.
You and I may see these bubbles and never think that should be a high school mascot. But never the less, someone did, and the fate of teenagers in Pennsylvania would never be the same again.
The mascot
A common question I get whenever I tell the story of the Bubblers is, how does someone dress up as a bubble? It’s a reasonable question; I mean, every football game needs someone in a costume, right? Hell, even the Cleveland Browns have a guy dressed up like a dog. But creating a bubble costume isn’t as easy as you might think.
To my knowledge, no one had ever really tried to be the bubble before the class of 2011. The student section was always dawned in purple and gold clothing, but that was as far as we got — until a friend of mine gave it her best try.
Unlike yours truly, my friend had an enjoyable four years of high school and had a rare amount of school spirit. Around our junior year, she took it upon herself to become the bubble. The suit consisted of a tight yellow sweater, purple pants, a yellow and purple mullet wig, and a whole lot of balloons attached to her body.
Was it a valiant attempt? You better believe it was. She dared to go where no one had ever gone before. But did it work out well? Absolutely not. When a bunch of middle schoolers see the chance to pop balloons, they’ll usually take it.
My friend got chased down by middle schoolers with fists full of gravel. The balloons didn’t even make it to the third quarter of the first game, but for the first twenty glorious minutes of that season, we had a mascot.
Bubblers blow hard
You may wonder, how does a gold and purple bubble strike fear into the hearts of opponents? Was Boiling Springs High School just amazing at football? Maybe if I ever paid attention at a game, I could answer that second question for you, but I’m pretty sure we weren’t.
And no, we didn’t strike fear into any hearts anywhere. What we did do was blow and blow hard. Blow bubbles, I mean. When you walked into a football game, you were handed a bottle of blow bubble solution. Every time we scored, you were supposed to blow those bubbles. But we didn’t score that often, so rarely any bubbles flew.
I guess the bubbles could have flown into an opponent’s eye and caused some mild discomfort. Mild discomfort was all we really ever caused anyone.
Bubblers are proud people
A bubble might seem like a novelty mascot to most, but if you haven’t lived in small-town America, you’ll never understand true passion for terrible mascots.
Boiling Springs is packed with every cliche a small-town needs:
- No stoplights
- More cows than people
- Tractors get driven to school
- An alarming amount of Trump signs
- Camo and duct-tape tuxedos at prom
And when a town has all of those things, you can bet it always has a deep love for its terrible mascot. Bubblers are proud of their mascot. Even after most graduate and go on to one of four state universities in the area, Bubblers still wear the purple and gold.
In fact, Bubblers love their mascot so much I was once booed by a class for suggesting we change to the Lakers. It wasn’t a great way to start my high school career but really set the tone for the next for years.
You can’t escape the bubble
When I learned my class’s ten-year reunion was coming up, I started to look back on those four years of high school. There were plenty of memories to look back on, most of which I still won’t admit to my parents.
Were they a great four years? Absolutely not. And for the record, I never owned any bubbler merch.
But I realized I never fully escaped being a bubbler. Hell, whenever two truths and a lie comes up, one of my truths is always my high school mascot was a bubble. And without fail, every single time, everyone assumes the bubble has to be the lie.
It doesn’t matter if you still wear purple and gold or post #bubblerpride on Facebook (yes, people do that) because once you’re a bubbler, you’re always a bubbler. I’ve spent ten years trying to run away from those four years, but one thing I’ve learned, when you have the worst high school mascot of all time, you’ll never truly escape it.
