In nature, bobcats and deer rarely clash. A bobcat might attack a fawn, but the feline predator is too small to present much threat to an adult deer. At Comfort High School, the peaceful coexistence of the two animals exceeds that in the natural world.
This is because the school, located about fifty miles northwest of San Antonio, has two mascots: a bobcat, for the boys teams, and a deer, for the girls teams. According to the school district’s website, “Comfort may be one of a few, if not the only school district with two mascots.” I intended to leave no stone unturned to prove this claim and help the unincorporated Hill Country town drop the “may be.”
My search quickly led me to Comfort athletic director and football coach Jay Rieken. Rieken, who has worked at the school for eighteen years, told me he was aware of at least two other Texas high schools—Floresville (Tigers and Jaguars) and Uvalde (Coyotes and Lobos)—that have two mascots.
But Comfort’s mascots, Rieken was quick to point out, are further apart in the animal kingdom than the mascots at other schools. “Coyote and lobo, tiger and jaguar—they’re canines or cats,” he said. Comfort’s deer and bobcats are “two completely different entities.”
It turns out that there are plenty of schools with separate mascots. During a Comfort football game in October, I asked a group of referees, who named Del Rio High (Queens and Rams) and Devine (Arabians and Warhorses) as other schools with two mascots. But even if Comfort isn’t alone in having two mascots, the story behind its sports split matters.
That tale goes back almost a hundred years, to the school’s girls basketball team at a time when the squad had just one basketball to play with and the girls wore white blouses and black bloomers as uniforms.
According to the school’s official narrative, after Comfort’s girls basketball team went undefeated in the 1928–29 season, local supporters argued that a team that dominant deserved better gear than white blouses and black bloomers brought from the players’ homes. But the athletic department lacked the funds to purchase new jerseys. “The girls decided they would get their uniforms the ‘old-fashioned way,’ ” Anne Stewart wrote in the 1993 book Comfort Schools: A Proud Tradition. “They would earn them.” The players sold candy and auctioned off basket suppers (baskets filled with edible goodies) to raise funds for the outfits. They even produced and acted in a play for the residents of Comfort and used the ticket revenue to help pay for new basketball uniforms.
As the girls worked, their male classmates didn’t offer much help. According to one version of the story, the boys’ disinterest inspired the girls to do their own thing. Once they’d raised enough money to buy new jerseys, they chose the deer as their mascot for the 1929–30 season. This aspect of the legend seems to resonate with students across generations. “It’s cool, because the girls found their own thing and they didn’t have to rely on the boys,” said Stryder Smith, a sophomore boy at Comfort.
The girls debuted their uniforms, which featured blue shorts and gold blouses with an antler design running up the neckline, against Boerne, according to a December 19, 1929, article in The Comfort News. The debut came with a win. “Thus the game continues . . . and the Comfort ‘Deer’ has defeated Boerne 45 to 19,” the report reads. The new uniforms, according to the publication, encouraged the players to “play harder.”
It’s a tidy narrative of girl power and a can-do attitude. It’s also not universally agreed upon as true. Charlotte Kneupper, a former teacher and coach at the high school, said she heard the deer came first but the boys didn’t find it masculine enough. After doing some research, though, she isn’t convinced that account is true. One leading alternative that Rieken and others mentioned links the Comfort Deer to Tivy High School, in Kerrville, less than twenty miles away. Tivy’s nickname is the Antlers. As this version of the story goes, the girls were looking for a way to save some of their freshly raised funds, so they purchased used uniforms from the nearby school. Perhaps the choice of the deer as the girls’ mascot had more to do with frugality than with a grand effort to distance the girls from the boys team.
One story that no one involved with Comfort High School sports mentioned to me is an account that appears in local newspapers from the 1920s. According to a November 1927 article in The Comfort News, the girls basketball team was called the Deer before the 1929–30 season. “The High School girls have again organized their basketball team and are practicing vigorously to win every game they play this season,” the story reads. “With the help of Miss Smith, their coach, they are working to put out the best team the school has ever had. At a recent meeting . . . it was suggested to give a name to the team and after quite a discussion the girls decided to call themselves ‘The Deer.’ ”
While Comfort’s mascots are deeply rooted in school history, the present-day students are on the front lines representing the deer and bobcats. Other schools don’t miss an opportunity to taunt Comfort about perceived confusion related to its mascots. One inconsistency that rival fans have focused on concerns the deer mascot, which has antlers, implying the exclusive mascot of Comfort’s girls teams is male.
Beyond the antlers, opposing schools’ supporters stick to a handful of chants. Perhaps the most common taunt is “PICK-A-MAS-COT”—which appears to be of limited effectiveness. “That never really got to me,” said Damian Neri, junior captain of the football Bobcats.
Another common refrain is “TI-VY RE-JECTS,” a reference to the legend that the 1929–30 girls basketball team wore the Tivy Antlers’ hand-me-downs. Perhaps the most aggressive comments are those about “making backstrap”—a reference to a cut of venison—out of the Comfort opponents.
Comfort’s students seem unfazed, and maybe even motivated, by the jeers. For Neri, rivalry games amp him up and remind him of what he loves about his 370-student high school. “Comfort is not very big, but those football games, those basketball games, when it’s rivals and stuff like that, the energy is really good,” he said. “I’m on the field, and you can hear everyone in the stands going crazy. I just love that energy. I get chills from it.”
Even the darkest rivalry moments seem to motivate Comfort’s athletes. After a 2007 volleyball game against Blanco High, players returned to their bus and found a deer carcass waiting for them. “It got everybody riled up, and the next time we played them, it was a beatdown,” Kneupper said.
While taunts and deer carcasses don’t seem to shake Comfort athletes, students at the school have mixed feelings about having two mascots. Some describe it as “confusing.” Others see it as a way for the school to distinguish itself. Still others express indifference. “If the girls like it, then I’m okay with it,” Neri said.
In recent years, some students have pointed out apparent inequities that favor the boys teams. The school has only one mascot costume, a bobcat outfit, which is worn to pep rallies and football games. A member of the girls volleyball team, though, told me that Comfort’s lack of a deer costume was just a logistical issue. “We already have enough trouble getting someone to be Bob [the bobcat],” she said.
Comfort’s cheer team has looked into getting a deer mascot. Cheer coach Hollie Garza acknowledged that the two mascots are “weird” but added that if the school is going to maintain them, it should have someone dress up as a deer. “I want that to be represented,” she said, although efforts to find the right costume have been fruitless so far. The options the team found online looked too much like Halloween costumes, said Emerson McElroy, a junior on the cheer team.
And what about mixed-gender activities? The school band uses the bobcat mascot, while the all-girls cheer team calls itself the Derks—an effort to squish the words “deer” and “bobcats” into a portmanteau, according to Garza.
The digital frontier might someday inspire a merger of mascots. When I showed Comfort students an AI-generated image of the offspring of a deer and a bobcat, they seemed to like it. “Not bad,” one volleyball player said. “That’d be dope,” a group of freshmen and sophomore boys agreed, speaking nearly in unison.
Despite support from students, the “Deercats” or “Derks” seem unlikely to replace Comfort’s dual mascots. Rieken says he has a stock answer for any suggestion related to changing the school’s mascots: “That’s not something I’m touching.” District superintendent Yvonne Muñoz agrees. Through the years, her mentors have told her, “One thing you never do in a town is you never change their mascots and you never change their colors.”
Every student, teacher, and parent I met in the Comfort High community seemed to have a coach or an elder who taught them a version of the school’s mascot history. Lois Haufler, a former player on the girls basketball team whose mother was a member of one of the first Comfort Deer teams, in the late twenties, is about as close to the story’s origin as anyone can get. “I think we just stayed with what was originally here,” she said. “I’m not going to mess with tradition.”
