Name-a-Day Calendar, July 11: Saint Francis Red Flash
Page 247 of 365
Chosen in: c. 1942
Chosen by: Sports publicist Simon Cy Bender
Saint Francis University1 was founded in 1847. Mainstream intercollegiate athletics began in 1882 with the formation of a gymnastics team, followed by football in 1892 and men’s basketball in 1905. These first teams were called by a variety of unofficial nicknames: Franciscans, Frannies, and (most often) Saints.
In 1927, the Saint Francis football team featured several speedy players, so The Loretto student newspaper2 took to calling them the “Red Flashes” and the community embraced it—so much so, in fact, that they also began calling other Saint Francis teams by that nickname.
Then, in 1938, The Loretto coined another nickname for the men’s basketball team: Frankies. This never quite took over as the primary nickname for the school, but it quickly became just as popular as “Red Flashes”, and the two were used interchangeably for some time.
Not long after that, school sports publicist Simon Cy Bender pushed hard to shorten “Red Flashes” to the current “Red Flash”, and clearly his efforts were successful. School sources state that this happened “within 15 years” of the Red Flashes nickname taking off, so it seems reasonable to conclude that this happened sometime in the early 1940s.
“Red Flash” continued to be used in conjunction with “Frankies” for about three decades before the latter was scrapped in 1972. For the past half-century, Saint Francis has been the Red Flash, and the Red Flash alone.
However, Frankie lives on as the name of Saint Francis’ costumed Friar mascot. Do you want to learn how to become Frankie the Friar? Too bad.
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Known as Saint Francis College until 2001
This paper was renamed The Troubador in 1993 and still operates under that name today.