Name-a-Day Calendar, August 29: Texas A&M–Corpus Christi Islanders
Page 296 of 365
Chosen in: 1996; began play in 1997
Chosen by: University president Robert Furgason and a Mascot Advisory Committee
Like its Division I Texas A&M branch campus counterpart in Commerce, Texas A&M–Corpus Christi (TAMUCC) was originally a private school. Founded by the Baptist General Convention of Texas as the University of Corpus Christi in 1947, the school originally began playing men’s basketball in 1949, calling their teams the Tarpons after a fish species native to the Gulf of Mexico, on which Corpus Christi sits.
That same body of water would end up irreversibly altering the course of the school’s history in 1970: Hurricane Celia made landfall near Corpus Christi that August and wrecked the school’s campus. As a result, the school turned to the State of Texas for monetary assistance in repairing and reopening their campus. The State ended up buying the campus outright, turning it into the public Texas A&I University at Corpus Christi in 1973. Unfortunately, this also resulted in athletics being cut from the school entirely that same year.
The State renamed the school Corpus Christi State University in 1977, after which the school joined the Texas A&M University System in 1989 and finally became Texas A&M–Corpus Christi in 1993. An athletics revival came soon after, with teams set to begin play in the 1997-98 academic year.
In preparation for this revival, the university sought a new mascot. On August 31, 1995, the Island Waves student newspaper published a call for mascot suggestions, offering $5001 to whomever submitted the winning mascot. These suggestions were vetted by a Mascot Advisory Committee and sent to a vote of the entire community, including students, staff, faculty, and even regular ol’ Corpus Christi residents. The winner was a tarpon, as the school’s athletics had been nicknamed prior to their 1973 discontinuation, but the Mascot Advisory Committee and university president Robert Furgason thought a nickname change was in order, so they decided that while the winning tarpon would remain the mascot, the teams would be known as the Islanders. TAMUCC’s campus is located on the southeast edge of the city, on what you can kind of call an island if you squint at it sideways.
I sourced pretty much that entire paragraph from this 2019 Island Waves article by Caleigh Sowder. For more information on TAMUCC’s mascot history since they became the Islanders in 1997, it’s well worth a read, but the long and short of it is that the tarpon was replaced in 2004 by a costumed Islander named Izzy that was culturally insensitive toward Pacific Islanders. Many spoke out against this portrayal, and TAMUCC eventually listened to them, replacing the mascot with the spitting image of Elemental’s Wade Ripple in 2022 (but keeping the “Izzy the Islander” name).
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