Name-a-Day Calendar, February 23: Hawaiʻi Rainbow Warriors and Rainbow Wahine

Page 109 of 365

Chosen in: 1974, then again in 2013 (Wahine chosen in 1972 and kept permanently)

Chosen by: Most recently the athletic department

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The school now known as the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa was founded in 1907. They began playing sports in 1909, but commercial air travel wasn’t a thing yet, so they mostly just played local high schools. They called their teams the Fighting Deans, because…actually, I tried really hard to look this up and I have no idea why they did this. Hawaiʻi wasn’t a teachers college or anything.

Intercollegiate football came in 1920, and three years later, Hawaiʻi pulled off an upset that would change their school forever. Their last game of the 1923 season was a home tilt on New Years Day 1924 against the school now known as Oregon State. The Aggies, as they were then called, had been playing football since 1893 and had a well-established program at this point, so they were heavily favored against this upstart Hawaiʻi team, but Hawaiʻi shut them out 7-0. At some point during the game, a rainbow appeared over the field, prompting fans and sportswriters alike to retort that the team would never again lose with a rainbow in sight. From then on, the team became known as the Rainbows.

Since then, the school has tried to rebrand itself twice, and both times were apparently at least in part due to homophobic rhetoric. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the word “Warrior” appeared following “Rainbow” in the names of Hawaiʻi’s sports teams in some unofficial capacity. Hawaiʻi claims this is an homage to Kamehameha the Great, but a Washington Post article from 2000 claims that the Hawaiʻi student newspaper “ridiculed the name Rainbows and linked it to gays”. The rainbow flag wasn’t really adopted as an LGBTQ+ symbol until the late 1970s and I can’t find this student newspaper article, so I’ll assume Hawaiʻi is correct here. The nickname “Rainbow Warriors” became official in 1974.

Just before that, though, Hawaiʻi started its first women’s sports teams. By 1972, “Rainbow Warriors” was already widely used unofficially, but Warriors were typically men and the professor who started the teams, Dr. Donnis Thompson, wanted a more female-gendered nickname. He dubbed them the Rainbow Wahine, the word “wahine” being Māori for “women”. Thus, officially, the “Rainbow Wahine” nickname predates the “Rainbow Warriors”.

By 2000, the rainbow was truly, actually recognized as an LGBTQ+ symbol, to the chagrin of some players, fans, and faculty. This included athletic director Hugh Yoshida, who dropped “Rainbow” from the team nickname and abandoned the previous athletics logo, which heavily featured a rainbow. He said the logo “really put a stigma on our program at times in regards to its part of the gay community, their flags and so forth”. This drew a lot of criticism, but the “Warriors” they were. The women’s teams largely didn’t have to deal with the same rhetoric, so they remained the Rainbow Wahine.

But the backlash continued and eventually homophobia fell out of style. In 2013, new athletic director Ben Jay reverted one of Yoshida’s changes and re-established the “Rainbow Warriors” nickname (though the rainbow logo remained retired). This reversion was almost universally praised and the teams remain rainbow to this day.

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