Name-a-Day Calendar, July 19: San Diego State Aztecs
Page 255 of 365
Chosen in: 1925
Chosen by: Student body vote
The San Diego State Normal School1 was founded in 1897 and began playing both football and men’s basketball in 1921. Originally these teams were called some unofficial nickname that had already been in use to refer to the student body as a whole. The most prominent were “Professors” (because it was a normal school) and “Wampus Cats” (because…I’m honestly not sure; the Wampus Cat is usually a thing of Appalachian folklore).
In 1925, the student body conspired to adopt one consistent, official identity: “Aztecs”. They voted to install it as their athletics nickname, changed the name of their student newspaper to The Aztec,2 and began using Aztec imagery in their yearbook. It’s unclear who exactly originated this suggestion, but it became reality nonetheless.
This was accepted largely without objection until around 2000. Since then, there’ve been near-constant efforts to either change the nickname, retire the mascot, or do both. Though the Aztecs were technically a Native American people, they haven’t existed for about 500 years; they were deemed exempt from the NCAA’s 2005 ruling against unsanctioned Native American nicknames and imagery because, well, who’s gonna sanction it?
To date, San Diego State seems pretty intent on keeping the “Aztecs” identity, but their mascot situation is a lot more up-in-the-air.
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Became San Diego State Teachers College in 1923; San Diego State College in 1935; California State University, San Diego, in 1972; and San Diego State University in 1974
This paper still runs today as The Daily Aztec.