Augusta's most recent minor league team will finally have a name Saturday afternoon, when owners and staff of a Southern Professional Hockey League team plan to unveil the fan- selected name.

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The name-the-team contest, which will run through midnight tonight online at augustachronicle.com, isn't the first of its kind in Augusta sports history. Augusta's previous minor league hockey team, an ECHL franchise that folded in December of 2008 after a decade-long run in Augusta, got its name, the Lynx, from a similar contest. More than 40 fans submitted the Lynx name in the contest, and an estimated crowd of 1,000 showed up for the unveiling on Feb. 26, 1998, according to Augusta Chronicle archives.

Officials from the new hockey team aren't expecting as large of a crowd this Saturday, but team general manager Gilles Richard said he hopes the announcement will help build the team's growing fan base.

"We just think it's a pretty cool way to start out," Richard said. "We wanted to make sure the fans have a way to get involved and hopefully they'll come out for the announcement."

Hockey doesn't own the market on seeking fan input. The Augusta Pirates, a minor league baseball team in the late 1980s, became the Augusta GreenJackets after a name-the-team contest. The new name was announced to a national television audience on CBS' Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt in September of 1993.

When the Ripken Baseball Group purchased the team in 2005, the minor league baseball team announced a contest for fans to help name the team's mascot. Among the 1,800 suggestions that were narrowed down to five finalists, the name "Auggie" beat out Blazer, Bogey, Divot and Mulligan.

Fans haven't gotten to name every minor league team that's come through Augusta. The Augusta Colts, an indoor football team that shut down after the 2008 season, got its name from owner John Sisson. A statement from the team when the name was announced in 2007 said the name would "reflect the area's strong ties to the horse and equine community in Aiken and Augusta."

The Augusta Groove, a minor league basketball team that lasted one season before folding last year, didn't directly ask fans to submit names, but a reader on augustachronicle.com posted the name under a story about the team. The team's owners, who originally came up with the Augusta Avengers, liked the anonymous poster's suggestion better and adopted it as their own.

Richard said he wasn't aware that so many minor league teams have used fan input in the past, but he also wasn't surprised. He admitted the long, drawn out process of asking for fans to submit names, narrowing the choices down to 20 options, then five finalists, has slowed the staff down a bit by preventing the team from having an official name and logo. But he said the method still holds value by allowing fans to have an active part in the team's creation.

"It's a marketing tool," he said. "You do it so you can get the community involved. It's a good way of getting the name out there, and getting the fans to be a part of it."

The five finalists for the hockey team are the Brigade, Chill, Patriots, River Hawks and Snipers. The winning name will be unveiled at 4 p.m. Saturday at Somewhere in Augusta.