Name-a-Day Calendar, June 6: Oakland Golden Grizzlies

Page 212 of 365

Chosen in: 1998

Chosen by: The President’s Cabinet via a Mascot Advisory Committee

---

In 1957, Matilda Dodge Wilson and her second husband Alfred Wilson donated their 2.25 mi² land in the Detroit suburb of Oakland to Michigan State University, who chartered a campus on the land and opened it in 1959. Michigan State University-Oakland, as it was originally named, became Oakland University in 1963 (and split from Michigan State entirely in 1970).

Oakland began playing men’s basketball at the College Division level in 1967 and landed on the Division II side of the split in 1973.¹ Their first teams were known as the Pioneers. Oakland is a space-grant institution, so some believe this nickname came in honor of the school’s aerospace “pioneers”; some other reports say that a small group of student-athletes thought up the nickname with then-athletics director Hollie Lepley for unrelated reasons in 1964. Regardless of how the Pioneers were pioneered, it wasn’t long before students visualized a more grounded pioneer as their mascot, one who wore a leather jacket and moccasins. They named him Pioneer Pete.

This was all well and good until 1997, when Oakland decided they would move up to Division I beginning in 1998. Men’s basketball coach Greg Kampe—then in his 14th season at the helm and now, in 2023, about to begin his 40th—thought that if the school’s teams were going to play at the highest level, they should have a fiercer, more appropriate mascot and a nickname to match.

Prodded by this suggestion, the university formed a Mascot Advisory Committee: 19 people from all areas of the university joining together to determine their new mascot. The university stipulated that a suitable mascot should be “animal-based, tough, unique, have regional ties, be collegiate, have graphic potential, and be gender- and race-neutral”. They asked the committee for three potential nicknames and logos to test at focus groups before making their final decision, and the committee hired a third-party firm (SME Design) to take the lead on creating potential logos and graphics.

The university’s stipulations ruled Pioneer Pete out from the jump (as he was neither gender- nor race-neutral), but “Pioneers” was still one of the three nickname suggestions the committee returned to the university, along with “Saber Cats” and “Golden Grizzlies”. Of course, we know “Golden Grizzlies” ended up being the pick; it was the clear favorite among the community members the university reached out to in the testing phase. The President’s Cabinet selected “Golden Grizzlies” as Oakland’s new nickname and announced their decision on March 23, 1998.

And Oakland would get its fierce mascot to match. Their current mascot is The Grizz.

Previous page: Notre Dame Fighting Irish

Next page: Ohio Bobcats

Find every page at the Name-a-Day Calendar hub!

1. The NCAA originally split into two divisions, University and College, in 1956. The College Division split into Division II and Division III in 1973, at which point the University Division was renamed Division I.