Name-a-Day Calendar, July 5: Richmond Spiders

Page 241 of 365

Chosen in: 1894

Chosen by: Richmond Times-Dispatch sportswriter Ragland Chesterman

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The current University of Richmond¹ was founded in 1830 and, best I can tell, began intercollegiate athletics in 1876. Their first teams in baseball and football were known as the Colts, so chosen because their baseball team played like “energetic … young colts”. Fair enough.

This changed almost overnight in 1894. That year, their baseball team rostered a star pitcher named Puss Ellyson, a tall, slender guy with a wacky delivery. Ragland Chesterman, a sportswriter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch with a very 1890s sportswriter name, often compared Ellyson to a spider. This moniker eventually spread to the entire baseball team, then to all sports teams at Richmond. The school named the spider the permanent mascot when they gained university status in 1920.

“Spiders” was not a unique nickname when Richmond first claimed it in 1894—Cy Young still pitched for the National League’s Cleveland Spiders at that time—but it is today. Richmond is the only collegiate sports program in North America known as the Spiders, and if there’s a pro team by that name, I couldn’t find it.

Today, Richmond’s costumed spider mascot is named WebstUR. Their Twitter account was last active in 2015, when they trash-talked their opponent ahead of an NIT game, which they lost.

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1. Known as Dunlora Academy from 1830-1832, Virginia Baptist Seminary from 1832-1840, and Richmond College from 1840-1920