When you’re talking more than 1.5 million votes, 7,000 isn’t a lot.
But that was the margin of victory Wednesday for the Kingswood Oxford Wyverns, who edged the Morse Shipbuilders to win the Region I title in the USA Today competition for top mascot.
The final tally: Kingswood Oxford, 1,590,384; Morse 1,583,037.
Just six days after they thought they had won the right to compete in the Nationals — only to have the contest extended because of a website snafu — backers of the Shipbuilders learned at 3 p.m. Wednesday they had finished second. Kingswood Oxford, a private school in West Hartford, Conn., faces five other schools for the national championship beginning today. Florida resident Troy Cunningham, a 1987 Morse High School graduate and spokesman for the Bath High School Alumni Association, expressed pride in the Morse effort.
“I keep getting instant messages — ‘bummed, bummed, bummed,” Cunningham said as soon as he knew the results. “But we did give them a run for their money. Some alumni from as far back as 1953 were voting.”
The contest was scheduled to end at 3 p.m. last Thursday, but the USA Today website became jammed due to the heavy voting.
At the time, Morse led with 1,092,633 votes — about 10,000 more than Kingswood in what had amounted to a two-way race for the Region I championship.
“That was tough,” Derek Samson, director of content for USA Today High School Sports said Wednesday. “We’re definitely sorry that happened last week. I can pretty much say that the Shipbuilders will be back again next year.”
The national winner will receive $2,000 for its athletic department. Second place will be awarded $1,000, with $500 for third, $250 for fourth and $100 for fifth.
“It wasn’t the money,” Cunningham said. “We have strong, strong alumni and in tenfold we could get our alumni to donate that amount of money.”
The Shipbuilder mascot depicts the shipbuilding heritage in Bath. A wyvern is a legendary winged creature with a dragon’s head, reptilian body, two legs — sometimes none — and a barbed tail.
lgrard@timesrecord.com
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