Name-a-Day Calendar, April 7: Loyola Marymount Lions
Page 152 of 365
Chosen in: 1919; became official in 1923
Chosen by: An unknown football fan
What is now Loyola Marymount University was founded as St. Vincent’s College in 1865 and, after a couple other name changes, became Loyola College of Los Angeles in 1917. The school’s first sports teams were known as the Loyolans.
The legend has it that, after a football game in 1919, an unnamed fan noted that the Loyolans were playing with the “fierce competitiveness” of lions, and so “Lions” should be their nickname; that “Lions” and “Loyolans” sound sonically similar was evidently a coincidence. This took a little while to catch on, but eventually it stuck; four years later, the October 5, 1923, edition of The Loyolan student newspaper announced that the school had officially nicknamed their teams the Lions.
A second, somewhat less popular theory is that the nickname came from the abundance of mountain lions originally inhabiting the land where their current campus now sits. The timeline adds up here, too, as ground was broken on this campus in the early 1920s and it opened in 1927.
Loyola Marymount’s costumed lion mascot is named Iggy. One of the first Google results for Iggy is a Los Angeles Loyolan editorial about how he’s ugly and needs a makeover.
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