NMC unveils Swoop, official Hawk Owl mascot at 75th anniversary party

Northwestern Michigan College spent 75 years without an official mascot, and campus leaders brought one out at last with a green hawk owl named Swoop. The debut came at the college’s 75th anniversary Student and Community Block Party on the Front Street campus in Traverse City, a celebration NMC cast as both a semester-ending gathering and a statement about who belongs on campus.

The block party ran from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday, April 25, and was open to students, alumni, staff, faculty, neighbors and friends. NMC said the celebration fit into a larger anniversary effort, with free carnival rides, activities, live music and food trucks filling the campus. The college had also planned a Sunday, April 26 backup date if weather turned bad.

Swoop was not an overnight invention. NMC adopted the northern hawk owl nickname in 2013, first visualized the character as a two-dimensional logo in 2014, and began planning for an official mascot in late 2024. College leaders have said the mascot is meant to symbolize belonging and a more vibrant campus culture, making Swoop less a one-off costume than a fuller campus identity built over time.

That identity is already visible in small but persistent ways across Northwestern Michigan College. Each graduate receives a Hawk Owl alumni T-shirt, and the student cafeteria is named the Hawk Owl Café. Those details suggest the mascot launch was not just about a single party in Grand Traverse County, but about giving a long-established college a more unified symbol for students, alumni and the broader Traverse City community.

NMC invited other mascots to join the welcome, including the Traverse City Pit Spitters mascot, mascots from the college’s university partners and Traverse City West High School’s mascot. The school framed the event as a public invitation to mark 75 years of NMC history while giving Swoop a formal place in the college’s future. For a campus that has long used the hawk owl in pieces, the new mascot finally turned that symbol into a visible face.