Name-a-Day Calendar, June 4: Northwestern State Demons
Page 210 of 365
Chosen in: 1923
Chosen by: Students Aileen Ritter and Truett Scarborough via student body vote
The Louisiana State Normal School was founded in 1884 and began playing intercollegiate sports in the early 1900s; football came in 1907, then men’s basketball followed in 1912. Neither of these teams had an official nickname until 1923, when the school held a student body contest to select one, offering $10 to the winner.1
This contest brought about a wide variety of suggestions full of character and imagination: Bloodhounds, Braves, Cyclops, Daredevils, Demons, Groundhogs,2 Musketeers, Pelicans, Serpents, and Sharks. The two frontrunners were “Braves” and “Demons” and the latter—submitted by Aileen Ritter and Truett Scarborough—won the student body vote.
On November 8, 1923, school president Victor L. Roy and football/men’s basketball head coach H. Lee Prather announced that their teams would be known as the Demons. Nearly a century later, here we are. Between then and now, the school changed its name to Northwestern State College of Louisiana in 1944, and “College” became “University” in 1970.
Northwestern State’s costumed demon mascot is named Vic the Demon, an homage to former president Roy and a play on the word “victory”. On October 24, 1992, during a football game against what is now the University of Louisiana at Monroe, Vic the Demon got into a fight with the opposing mascot in which he got his head ripped off and still won. Your mascot could never.
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P.S. It’s worth noting that some sources, including older pages on the official Northwestern State University website, list the school’s initial nickname contest as having taken place in 1922. I feel confident in saying this is incorrect. The school has a complete archive of its yearbooks online and the (spring) 1923 edition makes no mention of demons, while a depiction of the demon is shown within the first five pages of the 1924 edition.
$177.41 in 2023 dollars
Officially, this suggestion was “Prather’s Ground Hogs”. H. Lee Prather was the head coach of all of the school’s athletic teams at the time.