Since 2005, Macalester College has been represented by Mac the Scot, a bearded man donned in a blue kilt and orange shirt. 10 days into the college’s 150th anniversary, President Rivera sent an email to faculty, alumni and the student body to inform them that a new college mascot would be introduced later that year. Intentionally, that new mascot would be drastically different.
The reason for this change was clear: “the college’s birthday feels like the right time to reimagine a character that represents Macalester’s spirit,” Rivera wrote in the Jan. 10 email.
Last semester, a mascot advisory committee narrowed down the choices to a unicorn, the Loch Ness Monster, a kelpie and a highland cow, a breed of cattle native to Scotland. Eventually, after multiple rounds of voting, the Heilan Coo emerged victorious.
Director of Athletics Donnie Brooks echoed Rivera: “I felt like students who were coming into Mac just didn’t identify with Mac [the Scot] that much, and so we knew Mac [the Scot] wasn’t an official mascot.”
The committee wanted Coo to be more universal than Mac, in particular moving away from an explicitly male mascot.
“I think Coo is gender ambiguous, and if you want to call Coo what you want to call it, I don’t think Coo has claimed any pronouns.” Brooks said, noting that both male and female highland cows have horns.
The next step was designing Coo’s physique.
“You see a lot of mascots; they’re either super buff or super athletic, and … we wanted Coo to be Coo for everybody,” Brooks said. “Coo looks like it’s been in the gym. It’s eating at Cafe Mac, right? But also it looks like it’s there for fun.”
The mascot’s uniqueness was another major factor in the design process. There are bulls, cows and other similar animals in the mascot world, but not the Heilan Coo.
“You’ve seen the Longhorn, but you’ve never seen the Longhorn with the bangs,” Brooks said.
The new mascot’s hairstyle wasn’t the only subject of design, though. What the Coo would wear was also a factor the ‘coo-mittee’ had to tackle. Coo owns soccer, basketball and hockey jerseys to wear to the appropriate games. And this might not be all: “Coo also has a kilt which has not been flexed yet,” Brooks teased.
The Coo isn’t flying solo. Athletics Operations Assistant Katja McKiernan ’18 described herself as the “point person” for all things Coo. She schedules all the mascot’s appearances — not just varsity games, but also Meet Mac days and a mascot race at the Twin Cities Marathon weekend in October.
“We definitely want to get Coo at some more non-varsity athlete events,” McKiernan said.
Between Coo’s appearances, McKiernan is also in charge of washing the costume, which can be a hefty task because its foam muscles absorb water and become incredibly heavy. Often the soaked bovine must then be air dried for several hours because it can’t handle the heat of a tumble-dryer. Despite this arduous process, she stressed that the new costume is still an improvement.
“Mac the Scot was like some weird fleece thing that had to be dry cleaned,” she said. “So we’ll take this.”
McKeirnan also works with the mascot performers, the people who wear the Coo costume, to brainstorm ways Coo can engage with fans. She’s organizing a formal mascot training with the mascots of Minnesota Aurora, a women’s soccer club based in Eagan.
The Coo performers’ latest creation is the Highland Hustle dance, which debuted at the Senior Night Football game and had Coo grooving and shaking their rump to Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam.” McKeirnan noted that more Coo-led cheers are in the works.
Brooks hopes that these new game day traditions will strengthen school spirit at Mac. He’s particularly excited for the basketball season where Coo can engage with the gym’s defined student section in a more contained environment than the outdoor stadium.
While Coo was developed primarily as an Athletics brand, he ultimately wants the mascot to be “something that the entire community can adopt and feel proud of.” To Brooks, highland cows are, above all, steadfast and loyal: traits he thinks the entire Macalester community can unite around.
“A collective of highland cows is called a fold, and my hope is that students can see themselves — whether they’re a varsity athlete, non-varsity athlete, club student athlete, intramural athlete or ‘I’ve never touched a ball ever’ — that they can start to see some of the qualities of a Coo [in themselves].”
