Name-a-Day Calendar, December 13: Cal State Fullerton Titans
Page 37 of 365
Chosen in: 1959
Chosen by: Name-the-team contest, winner selected by student body vote
Welcome to California! I’m using each individual school’s preferred athletic branding, so the order of some schools here might be a tad confusing. I promise I’m not just skipping teams.
California State University, Fullerton is a fairly new institution relative to the rest of Division I, having been founded in 1959 as Orange County State College. They named their team in a fairly routine fashion: holding a name-the-team contest in their first semester and sending the best entries to a student body vote to pick the winner. Dr. Ernest Becker, then the Dean of Students, tasked the student council with whittling down over 100 suggestions to just three finalists: “Aardvarks”, “Rebels”, and the eventual winner “Titans”.1 Some sources say “Titans” was selected in large part because Dr. Becker loved the name and publicly endorsed it, but he doesn’t appear to be the one who originally submitted it in the contest; the originator has been lost to time.
A more interesting story lies behind why the Titans’ mascot is an elephant. The school initially had no mascot, even after picking “Titans” as their nickname. Then a meme grew out of control. Dr. Becker once laughingly suggested to the student government that they could establish an elephant racing club, and then they did, because why not? It started out as a joke, but it eventually blossomed into a bona fide event: “The First Intercollegiate Elephant Race in Human History”, sometimes called the first major sporting event in Orange County.2 The host school’s elephant was named Tuffy the Titan and it was eventually selected as the school’s official mascot.
Dr. Becker was not only a key piece of both the above stories, but also a monumental figure in Cal State Fullerton sports overall. He passed away in 1998, widely beloved by the Titan community.
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Part of me is upset they didn’t go with “Aardvarks”. A much larger part remembers my teenage years, when I’d spend every Thanksgiving weekend glued to my couch doing nothing but flipping between Feast Week college basketball games. The Wooden Legacy tournament was played at Cal State Fullerton’s gym for a while and I couldn’t help but admire their absurd court with the palm trees and the “TITANS” wordmark emblazoned across the center. It’s iconic to me.
The California Angels played their first five seasons in Los Angeles and didn’t move to Anaheim until 1966.