Name-a-Day Calendar, January 11: Delaware Fightin’ Blue Hens
Page 66 of 365
Chosen in: 1953, technically
Chosen by: School administration
Time for another U.S. history lesson.
Back in 1775, the Continental Congress raised a military battalion from “the Three Lower Counties on the Delaware River”.1 Within this battalion, Capt. John Caldwell scrounged together a militia with people from Kent County: the middle one, home to Dover. Capt. Caldwell loved breeding gamecocks in his spare time and he brought some particularly ferocious ones, descended from a blue hen, to his company of soldiers.
The history from there is a little murky. Some sources claim that Capt. Caldwell’s company staged cockfights for entertainment and attempted to match their ferocity in training for battle. Others claim that the name was applied after they began battling, as their prowess became more apparent and their ties to these gamecocks became more public.
In any case, the result is that this company came to be known as “The Blue Hen’s Chickens” (or sometimes “Caldwell’s Gamecocks”). The company retained this name after Capt. Caldwell died in 1777. It became a signifier of the upstart colony’s strength, in battle and otherwise.
The academy that would eventually become the University of Delaware had already existed for three decades when all of this went down but, of course, they wouldn’t touch athletics for another century-plus. In the beginning — they first fielded a football team in 1889 — the team had no official moniker and was identified using the school colors: “Blue and Gold”. Sometime in early 1911, the school adopted the blue hen as an official symbol, but their sports teams weren’t commonly called the “Blue Hens” for some time afterward.
The 1910-11 school yearbook is the first to be called The Blue Hen, beginning a period of approximately three decades in which the school couldn’t make up its mind on what it wanted to call its sports teams. Accounts from the 1910s and ‘20s call the teams the “Blue and Gold”, the “Blue Hen’s Chicks”, or sometimes just the “Chicks”. Sometime around 1930, the school’s official publications began routinely calling them the “Blue Hens”, though the other names were still used on and off until the late ‘40s. 1949 sees the first known usage of “Fighting Blue Hens”, used in reference to the men’s basketball team in The Blue Hen yearbook; the “g” would first become an apostrophe in the 1953 edition, referring to the ‘52 football team.
Seven decades later, Delaware’s athletic branding is far less fluid: they’re the Fightin’ Blue Hens and that’s that. No matter how often the University of Delaware clarifies that the breed of chicken is called the “Blue Hen” and, thus, the nickname and mascot are not gendered female, the word’s gender association obviously remains. In a country where several women’s teams play with male-gendered names emblazoned across their chests,2 Delaware is the only school in Division I that does the reverse: sending its men’s teams out with a name that typically is — or at least sounds — female.
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These counties — New Castle, Kent, and Sussex — were in a weird middle ground between self-sufficiency and association with Pennsylvania prior to the Revolutionary War. They officially broke off to form their own colony in 1701, but they still shared a governor with Pennsylvania until 1776. They’re now the entirety of the State of Delaware.
In Division I, that’s the Bulls (Buffalo and South Florida), Chanticleers (Coastal Carolina), Dons (San Francisco), Dukes (Duquesne and James Madison), Friars (Providence), Gamecocks (Jacksonville State and South Carolina), Peacocks (Saint Peter’s), Rams (Colorado State, Fordham, Rhode Island, and VCU), Stags (Fairfield), Toreros (San Diego), and Vaqueros (UTRGV). You could also include any Knights teams here (Fairleigh Dickinson and UCF, as well as Army’s Black Knights), as official knighthood is typically reserved for men; the female equivalent is damehood. That’s either 17 or 20 Division I teams that use undeniably male names for women’s teams, not to mention several others that use other typically-male names. I think. Let me know if I missed any.