Name-a-Day Calendar, August 20: Tarleton Texans
Page 287 of 365
Chosen in: 1961
Chosen by: Several students in a nickname contest
The John Tarleton College first opened its doors as a two-year school in 1896 and began playing football in 1904. The school’s first teams had no official nickname, and they didn’t pick one up until they joined the Texas A&M University System in 1917, at which point the school became John Tarleton Agricultural College and their teams became the Junior Aggies.
W.J. Wisdom became the athletic director and coach of all major sports at the college in the early 1920s, and he wanted a standalone identity for his teams, not a “junior” version of that from another school. In 1925, he offered $51 to any student who could suggest a nickname he liked enough to make official. Shortly after extending this challenge, Wisdom himself thought of the nickname that would become associated with Tarleton sports for decades to come. Evidently, on a walk one day, he was wracking his brain and remembered that most of Tarleton’s student-athletes were rural agriculture students (it was an ag school, after all). He tried to think of a nickname playing off that and the best he could come up with was “Plowboys”, a nickname he liked so much that he instituted it and kept the challenge’s prize money for himself.
By 1949, Tarleton had expanded their curriculum to the liberal arts, drifting away from agriculture enough to warrant a school name change to Tarleton State College, though they were still just a two-year junior college. They finally added four-year degrees in 1961, and now that they’d become a senior college, administration mulled over whether they should install a new athletics identity that didn’t make them sound like a junior ag school.
They threw that issue to the student council, and on October 2, the student council voted unanimously to enact a full student body vote on the issue. Two days later, the student body voted 403-178 in favor of ditching “Plowboys”. The ballot allowed room for new nickname suggestions in case those voting to change the nickname had ideas for a new identity. This drew a cavalcade of options—Chargers, Cowboys, Knights, Tornadoes, Trojans—but one was significantly more popular than the rest: Texans.
Student council set up another election for October 11 to vote on which suggested nickname should be Tarleton’s new athletics identity. They intended to do this in a sort of bootleg ranked choice fashion, requiring one choice to receive a majority of votes and holding runoffs until that requirement was satisfied, but that turned out to be entirely unnecessary; “Texans” earned 332 out of 660 votes in the very first round of voting, making it the immediate winner.
In 1968, when Tarleton introduced women’s intercollegiate sports, school administration nicknamed those teams the “TexAnns” in an attempt to give them a distinct identity and not just have them be called “Lady Texans” by local sportswriters. It worked, but, y’know, was this much better?
Half a century later, the school decided that no, it wasn’t. In 2019, the now-Tarleton State University dropped the “TexAnns” moniker, making all of their sports teams the Texans, likely for good.
Tarleton’s mascot, introduced in the 1970s, is the Texan Rider.
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