Name-a-Day Calendar, February 10: George Washington Revolutionaries
Page 96 of 365
Chosen in: 2023
Chosen by: University administration
What is now the George Washington University dates back all the way to 1821, when it was chartered by an act of Congress as Columbian College, but its athletic nickname didn’t officially come until almost a century later. After the university took its current name in 1904, the word “colonial” began being used to describe various school miscellanea, harkening back to the days of its new namesake: the school colors were “colonial buff and blue”, a school dance became known as the Colonial Ball, and a few more classes on colonial history were added to the curriculum.
Around this time, George Washington’s sports teams were suffering an identity crisis. Their teams were usually known either by their school colors or by one of several mostly unrelated nicknames. Sometimes they were called the Hatchetites (or Hatchetmen, or the Hatchets, or alternatively the Axemen) after the student newspaper, The Hatchet. In the mid-1920s, the football team was often called the Crummen after head coach Harry W. Crum. And sometimes the teams were called the Tongmen because…honestly, I don’t know about that one.
In any case, students didn’t really love any of these nicknames. On October 27, 1926, an unnamed editor of The Hatchet tried to take the matter into their own hands, suggesting that the colonial motif being used for other school matters be extended to intercollegiate athletics. They suggested the team should be called the Colonials. Then, because they were the newspaper, they just started calling the team by that name enough that it eventually stuck.
If I was writing this last year, that’d be where this page ends, but last year, the university announced that they would be retiring the Colonials nickname after the 2022-23 academic year. Some members of the community had opposed the name for years because the real-life Colonials of yore went to great lengths to oppress minorities, running Native Americans off their land and owning Black people as slaves. The university put a committee together in 2020 to determine whether the nickname should be changed, and the committee determined that yes, it should.
In addition to (and because of) the above, the committee came to the conclusion that the “Colonials” moniker simply did not unite the community and should thus be replaced, according to a release from the school dated June 15, 2022.
As this page originally went live, the school was still in the process of determining a replacement with the help of feedback from the community. Less than a week after I posted it, they had narrowed the replacement identity down to 10 options: Ambassadors, Blue Fog, Catalysts, Fireworks, Independents, Monumentals, Revolutionaries, Sentinels, Squad, and Truth.
On May 24, they announced their decision: they’d be the George Washington Revolutionaries. Logos followed in August. The mascot, a costumed George Washington, remains unchanged.
Previous page: George Mason Patriots
Next page: Georgetown Hoyas
Find every page at the Name-a-Day Calendar hub!