Name-a-Day Calendar, December 24: Chattanooga Mocs
Page 48 of 365
Chosen in: 1996
Chosen by: The athletics department
No one else in college sports calls themselves the Mocs. There’s a pretty good reason for that: a Moc is not a thing. So how’d the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga get to using this name for their sports teams?
Officially, it’s not short for anything. Logically, it’s a shortening of “Moccasins”, their original nickname which they used for several decades before switching in 1996. The word “moccasin” can mean many things but it’s most often used to refer to a soft leather shoe popularly worn by Native Americans. You can probably guess where this is going.
Chattanooga used primarily Native American mascots and imagery with the “Moccasins” name.1 By the mid-’90s, usage of this imagery for athletic branding purposes was socially frowned upon, so the school sought to rebrand. Rather than building a new identity from the ground up, they just repurposed their old one. At the same time they shortened their name to “Mocs”, they introduced a logo and mascot based on the state bird of Tennessee: the mockingbird. (I feel compelled to state again that the university claims “Moc” is short for nothing, not even “Mockingbird”.)
According to some folks involved with the rebranding, it was a long and arduous journey. The school brought in multiple third-party firms over a few years to discuss options and whittle them down to those most appealing. But the end result is that Scrappy the mockingbird has been a hit and has soared for over 25 years.
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It also briefly used a snake, after the types of venomous snakes colloquially called “moccasins”.