Name-a-Day Calendar, January 10: Dayton Flyers
Page 65 of 365
Chosen in: 1923
Chosen by: Dean Arns with Brother Charles Belz and Brother Arnold Klug
What is now the University of Dayton began before the Civil War as a Catholic boarding school for boys: St. Mary’s School for Boys was founded in 1850. It’d become a college prep school in the 1860s and then a degree-granting college in 1882, and it wasn’t long after this that the new St. Mary’s College began playing intercollegiate sports.
The sports teams at St. Mary’s were called the Saints, because duh, and this nickname would serve them until the school rebranded as the University of Dayton in 1920. According to a 1935 piece in the UD News, a contemporary student newspaper, after this switch, the school had no official nicknames and a bunch of unofficial ones that were basically just whatever sportswriters felt like calling them that day: Varsity, South Parkers,1 Hilltoppers,2 Red Devils,3 and even Van Hillmen.4
On October 19, 1923, the day before Dayton’s football game against southeast Ohio’s Marietta College, three faculty members — Dean Arns, Brother Charles Belz, and Brother Arnold Klug — decided that the teams should have one set nickname and got to work on brainstorming what that nickname should be.
Eventually, Arns suggested that the nickname have something to do with flight as an homage to Dayton’s own Wilbur and Orville Wright, who 20 years prior had become the “first in flight”.5 The three faculty members continued throwing some names around — Airmen, Aviators, Eagles, Hawks, even Kitty Hawks6 — before settling on “Flyers” because it was shorter and could “be used with better effect in songs and college cheers”.
Arns and the others commissioned the UD News to only use “Flyers” to refer to the school’s sports teams and that was that.
Dayton would cycle through a few mascots before finding a hit in Rudy Flyer, who debuted on December 1, 1980.
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Special thanks to University of Dayton archivist Jim McKinnon for helping me dig up key information for this page.
The school is located in the South Park neighborhood of Dayton.
The school is located atop a hill, which actually prevented several thousand dollars in property damage when the city flooded in 1913.
This name would later be recycled by the University of Dayton Band.
In 1922-23, the sports teams were coached by a man named Van Hill.
It’s North Carolina’s title, dang it. Wilbur wasn’t even born in Ohio.
It’s North Carolina’s title, dang it! Suggesting a nickname based on the North Carolina town is an admission of inferiority!