Name-a-Day Calendar, December 18: Central Arkansas Bears and Sugar Bears
Page 42 of 365
Chosen in: 1920 and 1973
Chosen by: School administration
What is now the University of Central Arkansas was founded as a normal school in 1907. As such, its sports teams originally had a few unofficial education-based nicknames: Normalites, Pedagogues, Teachers, Tutors, and (for some reason) Pea-Pickers.
The state of Arkansas didn’t have an official nickname yet either. Its residents shuffled through several unofficial monikers: the Toothpick State, the Diamond State, and most prominently the Bear State due to the large bear population living in its forests.
In 1920, a student at the school designed a class ring that featured a bear as a nod to this nickname. The school evidently liked it so much that they immediately adopted the bear as their mascot.
The state itself ended up going in a different direction with its nicknames: it officially became the Wonder State in 1923, then the Land of Opportunity in 1953, before settling on the Natural State in 1995. But the University of Central Arkansas still serves as a window into the identity that was.
A good amount of schools still use different nicknames for their women’s teams than they do for their men’s teams. Most of them just add the word “Lady” to the front of the name; I find these both pointless to cover and uninteresting in general, not to mention completely unnecessary and possibly sexist as a concept. However, a select few schools use a notably different nickname and Central Arkansas is one of them: their women’s teams are known as the Sugar Bears.1
In the late 1960s, women’s sports at the university were still getting off the ground and intercollegiate women’s sports were minimal compared to their men’s counterparts. This quickly changed when Title IX was passed in 1972; more Central Arkansas women’s sports teams were formed and they began receiving more coverage than one collective page in the school yearbook. Beginning with the 1973-74 season, school sources officially called them the Sugar Bears, which has stuck around ever since.
Sugar or no sugar, Central Arkansas is proud to be the Bears. But don’t just take my word for it.
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I think this nickname is also unnecessary and bigoted, for the record; I just felt it was unique enough to be worth covering.