Name-a-Day Calendar, April 1: Longwood Lancers

Page 146 of 365

Chosen in: 1977

Chosen by: The school board

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I’d just like to say at the top of this article that none of the below is an April Fools joke. Let’s begin.

Longwood’s first men’s basketball team was known as the Skins. And it wasn’t racist!

What is now Longwood University originally rose to prominence as a women-only teachers college with almost no sports presence. That all changed in the wake of World War II, when the G.I. Bill left a ton of male veterans in search of an education and the State Teachers College (as it was then known) accepted a few of them to ease the load throughout the rest of Virginia.

These men formed a basketball team in 1947 and began playing a bunch of nearby clubs and high schools. This team did not have an official nickname. It also did not have an official uniform. So at the beginning of one of their games, a referee couldn’t tell which team was which (despite, y’know, them being fully grown army troopers playing a troupe of local 16-year-olds) and requested the Longwood team remove their shirts to play a good old-fashioned game of shirts vs. skins. The audience of several hundred young women went nuts for this and began yelling “Go Skins!”. Suddenly, a nickname was born.

That initial team didn’t last very long, but it’d be reborn a few years later as the Pioneers. This second iteration of the Longwood men’s basketball program would play semi-officially, on-and-off, for most of the 1950s and ‘60s while the school still mostly only accepted women. By this time, a women’s basketball program had also begun in earnest.

Longwood begrudgingly became coeducational in 1975 following Title IX, at which point the school began a permanent men’s basketball program and sought to rebrand their entire sporting outfit. They submitted five nickname possibilities for their board to decide between: Crusaders, Lancers, Lions, Pioneers, and Virginians. The board chose “Lancers”.

In 2011, Longwood introduced a mascot to accompany the Lancers identity. To name it, they held a schoolwide contest, which led to a few humorous discarded submissions¹ and an eventual winner: Elwood.

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1. Turns out no one knows what Joan of Arc’s horse was called!