Name-a-Day Calendar, July 1: Quinnipiac Bobcats
Page 237 of 365
Chosen in: 2002
Chosen by: University administration
The current Quinnipiac University began as a junior college for commerce back in 1929. It wouldn’t expand to a four-year curriculum or take on the Quinnipiac name until 1951, and its modern athletic programs began play the same year. These teams were immediately dubbed the Braves, a seemingly fitting cognomen given that the name “Quinnipiac” came from a historical local Native American tribe.
This nickname did not see significant scrutiny until the early 1990s, when some women’s teams on campus voiced discomfort with being called the Lady Braves and pushed the school to adopt a different nickname. As a sort of compromise, Quinnipiac kept the nickname, but eliminated all Native American imagery and retired their human Native American mascot.
Eventually, that wasn’t enough. As with quite a few other schools in this scenario, the reckoning came in the late ‘90s and early aughts. In 2001, university president John Lahey finally recommended that the “Braves” nickname be retired, prompting a semester-long discussion on the topic between Lahey’s cabinet, the Faculty Senate, the Student Government Association, and the Alumni Board of Governors in fall of that year. These groups seconded Lahey’s recommendation and the Board of Trustees officially voted to scrap the “Braves” nickname on December 3, 2001; Quinnipiac then played the rest of the 2001-02 academic year without an athletic nickname or mascot.
The selection of a replacement nickname was handled by university administration, with great involvement from President Lahey, who claimed to have “personally looked at about 1500 logos and mascots from colleges and universities across the country” for inspiration. He and the rest of the administration gradually whittled the choices down to a few finalists. The pick, of course, was “Bobcats”, announced on August 28, 2002. In justifying this decision, Lahey noted that the only other school in the Northeast that carried the “Bobcats” nickname was Division III Bates College in Maine.1
These days, Quinnipiac’s mascot is a costumed bobcat named Boomer. He works out.
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Three other Division I schools share(d) this nickname: Montana State, Ohio, and Texas State.