As Amityville athletics adopts Hawks nickname, opinions vary on the change
Amityville’s quarterback Alana Henry passes the ball against Wyandanch in a Suffolk girls flag football game at Wyandanch on Tuesday, April 8, 2025. Credit: Jonathan Singh
For Amityville natives old and young, this will take some getting used to.
Amityville, long associated with its Warriors moniker, was one of 13 districts on Long Island impacted by the state’s ban on the use of Native American nicknames and imagery. The Amityville Union Free School District recently announced that its new nickname is the Hawks.
Like any change, the resulting emotion varies.
“I wear a bunch of different hats,” Amityville flag football coach Bill Maisel said before his team’s win at Wyandanch on Tuesday. “As an alumni, I kind of would have liked it to go back to the Crimson Tide. But as a member of the school system, I think it's great that the kids got to vote. It's their school.”
Maisel, a 1989 Amityville graduate and longtime wrestling coach at the high school, is currently an elementary school teacher in the district. The Crimson Tide was never an official nickname, but it was commonly recognized as one alongside Warriors. Other finalists for the new nickname were the Cardinals, Storm and Tide.
“I think the kids in my building are just too young to really understand,” Maisel said. “I joke around, we could have been called the Amityville Pokemons, and they would have been happy because they're 8, you know what I mean? But I think the high school kids are happy. It's something — you talk about tradition.
“I know the old-timers are upset that the tradition has kind of faded away, but there's always got to be a start for a tradition. So this is the start for the new tradition.”
The sentiment among the current Amityville flag football captains — Imani Brown, Alana Henry and Erin Kreuder — is mixed as well.
“Honestly, I didn’t like it,” Brown said. “I feel like Warriors is more original and it fits us better.”
Said Henry: “I agree, honestly. But it’s also new, so it could grow on some people. But I would have loved to stick with the Warriors.”
Kreuder was pleased the students had a role in the process. "Well it was nice that they involved the students. There were, I think, two or three votes that went out, and we voted on a bunch of names, and then they were put into the final vote. So it was nice to see that they cared about the students’ input.”
But Amityville was not alone, and the athletes recognized there was not much of a choice.
“Well, we had to change it,” Kreuder said. “I think a lot of people are upset with it, but it’s going to grow eventually. I mean, we were forced — we have to change it. So this was bound to happen.”
With Andy Slawson
CORRECTION: Some print editions Wednesday mistakenly repeated Kreuder's quote on the students' role in the process and incorrectly attributed it to Brown.
Ben Dickson joined Newsday’s high school sports staff in 2023 after graduating from Maryland, where he covered several of the Terrapins' teams.
