Name-a-Day Calendar, July 12: Saint Joseph’s Hawks
Page 248 of 365
Chosen in: 1929
Chosen by: The student body
The Jesuits (Society of Jesus) founded Saint Joseph’s College in 1851.1 Intercollegiate athletics began with baseball in 1894, then men’s basketball in 1905 and football in 1922. These three teams originally went by no nickname, but the last of them eventually led to the one the school still uses today.
In 1929, the student body dubbed all of Saint Joseph’s’ teams the Hawks, “suggestive of the aerial attack which has made our football team so famous”. Almost a century later, the Hawks still flap their wings.
I mean that literally. In 1956, Saint Joseph’s debuted a costumed hawk mascot that has legitimately never stopped flapping its wings.
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Gained university status in 1978