LJWorld.com

When Meridith Ashley says she is a Jayhawk, she means it literally. The Prairie Village sophomore has spent the last year as Big Jay, the main Kansas University mascot. While Ashley, who is tall and thin with blond hair and blue eyes, may not be who people expect a mascot to be, the chance to spend her college years in a big blue costume has been a dream come true.

Her career as a mascot began her senior year in high school, when Shawnee Mission East acquired a new Lancer costume.

"I've always had a crazy personality. 'Dumb and Dumber' is my favorite movie, if that tells you anything," she said. "So ever since I'd gotten the idea that I could be the mascot, I wanted to do it."

When she arrived at KU, Ashley found out when Jayhawk tryout were and decided to go for it. Her tryout consisted of a clinic, where she learned the fight song, proved her conditioning with a 20-minute run and took part in interviews. For the actual tryout, she had to perform a short original skit. She enlisted a friend, Jeff Phelps, to narrate. Together they wrote a script about Big Jay traveling around the world in search of new ways to beat the Missouri's Truman Tiger.

"I had an awesome narrator," she said. "During the skit, my head band fell across my eyes and I lost all my visibility. Then, I lost my boot. Jeff kept up with me the entire time."

Ashley played three sports in high school, which turned out to be good mascot training. The head piece alone weighs almost 15 pounds, she said, and the suit on the whole is very restrictive. With no air-conditioning in Allen Fieldhouse, she can get pretty sweaty.

"I don't think that it can get much hotter than that," she said, "No air-conditioning is not good for mascots."

Football games, though cooler, are a lot more work.

"The first game that I did, I had to run the flag in," she said. "That was the scariest thing, because all I could hear was the football team stampeding after me." Part of the Jayhawk's job is to run the flag around the field each time KU scores. When KU scored 70 points against San Diego, her duties turned into a real workout.

The mascots usually split the football games and each do a half to keep them from getting too tired. This year there were only three mascots -- two people for Big Jay and one for Baby Jay. Three more people have been added for next year, so the responsibilities will be divided into thirds.

"When people ask me what my major is, I usually say mascoting, because it feels like that is all that I do," Ashley said. In reality, Ashley is an elementary education major who coaches swimming in the summer.

Aside from sporting events, the mascots will usually do four or five public appearances a week. Ashley's first appearance was a surprise 100th birthday party for a woman in Tonganoxie, and last year she was able to walk her brother down The Hill for his graduation. In the past, mascots have even been asked to attend funerals.

Kids love the show

Children make her love her job as Big Jay.

"You have to let them approach you," she said, "Because there are lots of screamers."

One of the rules of being in the suit is that the mascot is not allowed to talk. This is the hardest thing for Ashley. "I'll get the cutest little kids that will ask me questions and I can't answer them."

At her first baseball game, a little boy told her she needed dance lessons. "I kicked him," she said, "I can do that, though, the boots are soft."

Once, after the suit had gone unwashed for a while, a 4-year-old shied away and told her she needed a bath. "I share the costume with a guy and there is no way it can be washed every time," she said. "The smell of Febreze (fabric spray) has been totally ruined for me now."

Last summer, Ashley and the other Jayhawks attended spirit camp in Milwaukee. There were nearly 60 mascots from other schools there. They learned skits and practiced improvising.

"It was pretty crazy with that many mascots in one room," she said, "But they're the only ones who know what you go through."

Win some, lose some

Mascot etiquette dictates that the away mascot always lets the home team mascot "win" in their play fights, but that doesn't mean the urge isn't there to do otherwise.

Ashley's first away game was at Kansas State University, a situation that scared her after hearing that a previous Jayhawk had gotten beer bottles thrown at it by University of Missouri fans. She said that sticking close to the cheerleaders is usually the best way to protect herself, but at the K-State game she didn't have that option. After changing into her costume, she had to walk back in front of all the K-State fans.

"They were all yelling insults and cussing at me. Then two guys on stilts came over and kept messing with me. I kept thinking how easy it would be to just knock them over, but of course I couldn't do anything," she said.

Shortly after that game, Ashley wrote a semi-autobiographical story about a mascot and its experiences for her fiction writing class. Her teacher, who did not know that Ashley was the Jayhawk, wrote on her paper that her protagonist was immature. "I was like, 'immature, well, that's me,'" she said.

Though Ashley knows that some professional mascots make between $60,000 and $70,000 a year, much more than elementary school teachers, she thinks that her mascot days will end after she graduates.

"I'm not in this for money or anything, just fun," she said, "I am really glad that I have had this experience."