Name-a-Day Calendar, January 26: ETSU Buccaneers
Page 81 of 365
Chosen in: 1935
Chosen by: A schoolwide mascot contest, perhaps suggested by student Clyde Wayman
In its early days, what is now East Tennessee State University was a teachers college whose sports teams were known as the Teachers. As with pretty much every other school that used this nickname, the student body eventually deemed it too tame.
The students held a mascot contest in early 1935. Nobody seems to know what other possibilities were suggested, but “Buccaneers” was a landslide winner. It’s never been confirmed who suggested the nickname, but ETSU archivist Jeremy Smith has a theory. A student named Clyde Wayman was attending the college when the contest was run. Wayman had played football for nearby Jonesborough High School (since renamed David Crockett High School) and one of the schools Jonesborough often faced in football was Big Stone Gap High School up in southwestern Virginia. At the time, the buccaneer was the mascot for Big Stone Gap.
In my personal opinion, this is a pretty shaky theory. It’s not the official school explanation, which is even weirder. Bucky’s official bio on the ETSU website tells a tale of a pirate named Jean-Paul LeBucque, who terrorized what is now the southeastern United States before fleeing inland to eastern Tennessee to hide his treasure near an underground river known as Pirate Creek. None of this is real — there was no Jean-Paul LeBucque and there is no Pirate Creek — but it’s a more fun explanation than “a student in the 1930s might have suggested it because he played high school football against a team called the Buccaneers”, so I can’t fault them for running with it.
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