Name-a-Day Calendar, July 2: Radford Highlanders
Page 238 of 365
Chosen in: 1976-77
Chosen by: School administration
The history of Radford University begins in 1910, when the school was founded as the State Normal and Industrial School for Women at Radford. The school remained women-only until 1972, including a 21-year stretch from 1943 to 1964 in which the Commonwealth of Virginia merged it with nearby Virginia Tech, which was mostly male at the time. Best I can tell, Radford began intercollegiate athletics in 1971, seven years after the split from Virginia Tech but still a year before they began admitting men.
These initial teams did not have a proper nickname, but it didn’t take long for the school to rectify that. At some point in the mid-1970s, the school’s administration nicknamed their teams the Highlanders on account of southwestern Virginia’s Scottish heritage, at the same time changing their school colors from purple and gray to the current red, white, and blue. Scouring through the archives of Radford’s yearbook, The Beehive, the earliest reference to a “Highlanders” sports team is in the 1976-77 edition, leading me to believe that this is the year they made the switch. All of the yearbooks from this period are in black and white, so I can’t really tell when the school colors changed.
Learn all about Radford’s highlander mascot on this webpage that I’m pretty sure hasn’t been updated since 2004.
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