Name-a-Day Calendar, January 30: FIU Panthers
Page 85 of 365
Chosen in: 2010
Chosen by: The athletics department
Florida International University is a relatively new school, as it began both collegiate instruction and intercollegiate competition in 1972. The next year, they figured they should have a mascot, so they created a committee of students and faculty with the objective of determining a few suggestions to send to a schoolwide vote.
As the name “Florida International University” implies, the school’s attendees were often from other countries, so the committee considered some names to match, like “Ambassadors” and “Diplomats”. But the top two suggestions had nothing to do with this. One, “Trailblazers”, owed to the school’s location on Tamiami Trail;1 the other, “Suns”, came from…well, take a guess.
The committee couldn’t form a consensus in favor of either name. Some thought “Suns” was too obvious while others, like the head baseball coach, thought “Trailblazers” was too long to fit on a jersey. Then Judy Blucker, a faculty member on the committee, suggested splitting the difference: “Sunblazers”. This was a hit and won the schoolwide vote easily.
The new and relatively unique school had found its perfect match in this new and unique identity. Then they threw it away. In 1987, the athletics department decided to go in a different direction and ditched the Sunblazers branding, replacing it with “Golden Panthers”. As far as I can tell, they never gave an official reason for this switch, though there has been some speculation that they wanted a fiercer mascot for the football program they were trying to start around this time.2 The mascot itself is a nod to the heralded “Florida panthers” that have long roamed the nearby Everglades and were named the official state animal of Florida just five years prior.3
The “Golden” bit was unceremoniously dropped in 2010 and that’s how things stand today. But, all in all, I think it’s safe to say no one will ever forget the Sunblazer.
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Tamiami Trail is the 275-mile stretch of US 41 that connects Tampa and Miami via the Gulf Coast and the Everglades. Where FIU sits, the road is known locally as SW 8th Street. A few miles farther east, it crosses into Little Havana and becomes the famed Calle Ocho.
This football program wouldn’t end up playing a game until 2002.
In claiming this branding, FIU beat the NHL’s Florida Panthers by six years.