Name-a-Day Calendar, January 20: East Carolina Pirates
Page 75 of 365
Chosen in: 1934
Chosen by: The Men’s Athletic Association with help from history professor A.D. Frank
East Carolina University has its roots as a teachers college, so they called their initial sports teams the Teachers. As it turned out, students couldn’t really get excited to go root for a team called the Teachers, so the Teco Echo student newspaper sought out new nickname possibilities in 1934. They specified that they wanted to rename the women’s teams but were also open to a better name for the men’s teams.
Enter Blackbeard. Yes, that Blackbeard: the famous pirate. If you’re not up on your pirate history, you might not know his reign of terror mostly occurred on the Atlantic coast of North Carolina.1 And his real name? Edward Teach. The wordplay couldn’t be more obvious. On February 19, 1934, the Teco Echo reported that the Men’s Athletic Association had named their teams the Pirates. In that year’s Tecoan yearbook, they further announced that the name was dedicated to history professor Dr. A.D. Frank, ostensibly for teaching them about the history of Blackbeard and tipping them off to the punny nickname opportunity.
Around the same time, the East Carolina women’s teams were given the nickname “Ramblers”, but their women’s basketball program2 was so good, and so loud about their goodness, that opponents refused to schedule them after 1939 and they were reduced to an intramural team for three decades. When they returned to intercollegiate competition, they took the “Pirates” nickname.
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He settled in Bath, North Carolina, about 30 miles east of East Carolina’s Greenville campus.
Relevant information at bottom of page 14