I would like to air a pet peeve of mine. In the above sentence (shown on the homepage of the Swarm's site) the Swarm are mentioned as a single entity. This bugs me. They are NOT a single entity in the sense as used. The Swarm are plural. Technically they are considered a special case of the "collective noun" which can be referred to as both the singular as well as plural. (So are the Wild... but thats something different). I think that to keep the professionalism of the beautiful website, this should be fixed... and avoided in the future.

This happens often in Minnesota Sports (especially in the paper... cough cough Sid Hartman talking about the Wild) and it bugs the heck out of me.

Does anal retentive have a hyphen in it?

I hold my 13 yr old son to a higher standard than I do most media outlets.

The Swarm are a single entity as they are "one" team. The sentence refers to them as the team and not individual players.

I used to have the same issues until someone explained that to me. It still doesn't sound right, but it is.

This is a case where writing plainly irritates the well educated, but this construction has a tendency to confuse fewer people. It really comes down to whether on recognizes the team as collection of indidividuals or as the single entity.

It really is not a matter of right or wrong, but simply of preference.

My preference is not have non-plural sounding names so that this confusion is eliminated.