During every St. Joe’s men’s and women’s basketball game, the Hawk mascot can be found on the sideline, flapping its wings. This caught the eye of two members of the Coastal Carolina University game staff during the Myrtle Beach Invitational on Nov. 18.

“At the beginning of the tournament, my friend R.J. and I saw that the Hawk was flapping and not stopping,” said Stephen Pratt, a Coastal Carolina game staff member. “So I looked it up and found a whole article about how the Hawk hasn’t stopped flapping since he debuted in 1956. My boss decided we should count the flaps.”

Pratt and R.J. Reyes, another game staff member, were both drawn to the tradition and decided to take on counting the flaps as a project for the tournament.

“The Hawk was really the only mascot we had seen at the tournament,” Reyes said. “So we would watch him flap. We didn’t really know anything about him, so we had to dig some stuff up. We found the whole system and tradition and decided to count.”

The system was simple, follow the Hawk and count each time he flapped his wings.

“We downloaded a counting app on my phone,” Reyes said. “Starting at the national anthem, I would start counting. We would follow him through the whole game and count each flap. It was pretty fun.”

The results they got ended up being very surprising, according to Pratt.

“We had heard his average was around 3,500 flaps,” Pratt said. “But by the first half he was already around 3,000, so we knew he was going to be way above that.”

According to Reyes and Pratt’s count, the Hawk flapped his wings 6,164 times during St. Joe’s game against West Virginia University on Nov. 18. Pratt was impressed with the strength of the Hawk.

“I thought that the guy must have really big shoulders and be jacked,” Pratt said. “He must be to stand out there for two and a half hours in a mascot suit and flap.”