Name-a-Day Calendar, July 16: Sam Houston Bearkats
Page 252 of 365
Chosen in: 1923
Chosen by: The athletics department
The State of Texas established Sam Houston Normal Institute in 1879 and the school began playing football in 1911. Like many normal schools, their first teams were known as the Normals.
In 1923, the state redesignated the school as Sam Houston State Teachers College,1 so the athletics department figured “Normals” was no longer a suitable nickname. The replacement they came up with was “Bearcats”, a creature they believed to be mythical, based on the evidently popular local phrase “tough as a bearcat”. In actuality, the term “bearcat” is sometimes used as an alternate name for both the binturong and the kinkajou, two real animals that resemble sorts of combinations between bears and cats (and are coincidentally the only two carnivores with prehensile tails2). Once they realized this, they quickly replaced the C with a K in an attempt to disassociate from the real animals and establish their own term for the mythical creature they intended to install as their mascot. This was confusing at first, but “Bearkats” soon caught on as the official nickname for all Sam Houston athletic teams.
After World War II, the school’s then-president Dr. Harmon Lowman spearheaded an effort to replace “Bearkats” with a nickname that more fittingly connected to school namesake General Sam Houston. Dr. Lowman’s suggestion was “Ravens”, as Gen. Houston himself was nicknamed Raven by the local Cherokee tribe. Dr. Lowman polled school alumni to garner interest in a switch, but most of the alumni polled had only ever known their school to be the Bearkats, and people are generally averse to change, so the Bearkats they remained.
Sam Houston briefly acquired a live kinkajou to serve as the school mascot in 1952, but they couldn’t properly domesticate it, so they released it not long thereafter. Their current costumed mascot, Sammy Bearkat, debuted on December 14, 1959.
Previous page: Saint Peter’s Peacocks
Next page: Samford Bulldogs
Find every page at the Name-a-Day Calendar hub!
Became Sam Houston State College in 1965 and gained university status four years later
Tails that have the ability to grasp onto other objects