Name-a-Day Calendar, April 25: Milwaukee Panthers

Page 170 of 365

Chosen in: 1964 (made official in 1965)

Chosen by: Multiple student body referenda

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The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee has a rather long history of athletic rebrands that more or less align with overarching school rebrands. Let’s start at the beginning.

The school was founded in 1885 as the Milwaukee Normal School. They started athletics in 1895 and called their teams the Normals. This persisted until 1927, when the school rebranded itself as Milwaukee State Teachers College. At this time, rather than continue using an athletic nickname based on education, the school went for something completely different: Green Gulls, for the school’s primary color at the time was green and Milwaukee is located on the rather large body of water that is Lake Michigan.

In 1951, the school’s curriculum expanded beyond teacher education and so came another school name change, this time to Wisconsin State College of Milwaukee. Here, the athletic nickname remained the Green Gulls, but not for long. The school merged with an extension center of the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1956 to officially become the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and everything changed as a result. Milwaukee switched their colors to red and white to match Madison, rendering “Green Gulls” nonsensical as a nickname and prodding a rebrand to a more color-coordinated bird: Cardinals.

This newly minted branch of the University of Wisconsin expanded rapidly, quickly forging their own identity separate from the primary branch in Madison or even the extension center they’d just absorbed. It didn’t take long for students to want an athletic identity all their own as well, but it would take a few steps to get from A to B.

After enough students indicated their interest in a change of identity, the school held a referendum on the issue on December 7 and 8, 1964; here, students submitted their suggestions for school colors and for mascots. Over the week that followed, the Student Life and Interest Committee was supposed to select the top three color combinations and the top three mascots to present to the student body for a vote. In actuality, they selected three color combinations and four mascots, which may or may not have been due to a tie; it’s not clear.

So, on December 14 and 15, 1964, students voted on whether their colors would be black and gold, blue and white, or green and white, and also on whether their nickname would be the Beavers, the Clippers, the Hawks, or the Panthers. But the ballot also allowed write-ins for some reason,¹ so really there were infinite possibilities.

Students cast 1450 ballots in this final vote, and the winners were clear. Black and gold became the school colors with 889 votes; blue and white received 210, green and white got 164, incumbent colors red and white were written in 143 times, and 30 other votes were cast for various write-in color combinations. Meanwhile, Panthers became the nickname with 810 votes; Hawks got 305 votes, incumbent Cardinals 136, Beavers 88, and Clippers 56, leaving 55 miscellaneous write-in votes. The school ratified these results in February 1965 and put them into effect for the 1965-66 school year.

These choices obviously didn’t please everybody. The UWM Post student newspaper interviewed some students on the issue in May, five months after the vote, and quite a few people thought the school’s want to distance themselves from UW–Madison was ill-advised, with one senior saying that “UWM is an important school because UW–Madison is” and an envious freshman retorting that they “would rather be affiliated with UW–Madison than UWM because UW is a better school”. True as both of those statements may be, the school stuck with the identity change and they’ve been black and gold Panthers ever since.

Milwaukee has cycled through a few mascots since 1965. Their current mascot, a costumed panther named Pounce, debuted in 2007.

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1. Editorial: there’s no reason to allow write-ins if you’ve already sifted through hundreds of suggestions to determine the most popular.