Flying Squirrels it is!

React in the comments section below...

To be fair, it did also win the unofficial poll here

Today's the day

Just under 1 hour from now (2:30 PM) we'll get the announcement of the team nickname for club. Not sure if we'll get a release of the logo today as well but that shouldn't be too far off. Look for merchandise to start popping up after that.

It'll be nice to be able to refer to the team by name instead the new team coming to Richmond.

Real life has gotten in the way of updates over the last week so here's a quick recap.

CNBC contest added Hush Puppies for a 6th contestant. Hambones was booted for being culturally insensitive. Flatheads has also drawn controversy. We'll se in a bit how all this affected the decision.

My personal opinion is that Flying Squirrels or Rock Hoppers will be our winner. Rhinos is too generic. Hush Puppies doesn't do anything for me and Flatheads is now supposedly controversial as well.

Squirrels make for a much easier logo design, I'd be interested to see what they come up with for Rock Hoppers.

You can watch the announcement live here:
http://www2.timesdispatch.com/rtd/news/live_video/

Hush Puppies?! ugh

CNBC's contest has added Hush Puppies to the mix. While a cross promotion between food and shoes is an enticing venture, I'm still not impressed.

CNBC throws its hat in the Name Game

Darren Rovell and CNBC get involved in the naming process. Looks like the club has given CNBC readers/watchers a "wild card" entry into the name game. There's still hope that we don't end up with one of our existing 5 underwhelming choices.

We also get more detailed arguments than we saw in the RTD for our existing 5 choices.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/33206550

Check it out and submit your names to CNBC and maybe we can pull an upset W.

Team explains their choices

Reading this doesn't make me feel much better about our prospective names. Looks like we're in the majority here since I've yet to hear from anyone who actually likes one of our 5 possibilities.

VP/COO Todd Parnell explains the choices here:

The franchise's front office liked the five finalists for these reasons, according to Parnell:

Flatheads: a kind of catfish commonly found in the James River.

Flying Squirrels: soar in Virginia.

Hambones: paying homage to Virginia ham.

Rock Hoppers: people or animals on river rocks.

Rhinos: alliteration featuring a powerful image.

http://www2.timesdispatch.com/rtd/news/local/article/BASE06_20091005-215802/297659/

I'd like to assume that some better names were nixed in that process and that they truly didn't think these 5 names were the best of the bunch.

Like I said, yesterday... pray for a talented graphic design team to be working on the logo.

Just for the record...

My submission was

The Richmond Boulevards

Not sure how a logo could've been incorporated out of that... maybe some sort of symbol like the autobahn signs overseas. But I still like it better than the 5 we got.

Busy post day...

Drop some of your submissions in the comments!

Not so fast...

Here are the 5 finalists:

Rock Hoppers
Rhinos
Flatheads
Flying Squirrels
Hambones

Color me unimpressed, these all pretty much suck. Let's hope they get an uber talented graphic design team that can work miracles and come up with a decent looking logo.

Vote in my unofficial poll in the right column

False Alarm

Well, it looks like someone had a long weekend. According to this RTD article, the names will now be released for public vote tomorrow instead of today like originally planned.

http://www2.timesdispatch.com/rtd/sports/baseball/name-the-team/

The Name Game...

We're still waiting for the 5 finalist names to be released. I'll post them here as soon as I see them.

The Name Game, Phase 2

http://www2.timesdispatch.com/rtd/sports/professional/article/BASE02_20091001-221206/296900/

6,000+ submissions later, we'll get to see a list that's been trimmed down to 5 on Monday. I think it'll be interesting to see where ownership puts their preference. From Parnell's comments, it seems like they'll be looking for something unique.