Name-a-Day Calendar, March 30: LIU Sharks

Page 144 of 365

Chosen in: 2019

Chosen by: Student body vote

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Long Island University has cycled through three athletic identities in its near-century-long history, all of them pretty dang cool.

The school’s original Brooklyn campus was established in 1926 and began intercollegiate athletic competition the next year. They wore blue jerseys, so they were quickly dubbed the Blue Devils.

LIU switched to black uniforms in 1935, which led a sportswriter for the Brooklyn Eagle to report that the team now looked like blackbirds. Given the Blue Devils nickname was entirely based on the previous blue uniforms, this “blackbirds” quip quickly became the most common way to refer to the basketball team, making it all but official as a nickname.

In 1954, the school founded the C. W. Post College¹ in suburban Brookville, which acted as a satellite campus of LIU and was later rebranded as LIU Post. The Post campus eventually began playing intercollegiate sports at the Division II level, their teams known as the Pioneers. Following this development, the Brooklyn campus was most commonly called “LIU Brooklyn” despite being the primary campus of the university, so their teams were officially known as the LIU Brooklyn Blackbirds.

This all continued for over half a century until October 3, 2018, when LIU announced that, beginning in 2019-20, it was combining the athletic programs of the Brooklyn and Post campuses into one collective to be operated by the Brooklyn campus and compete at the Division I level. They also announced that they’d be retiring the Blackbirds and Pioneers branding for the individual campuses and replacing them with a new, more unified identity.

The next spring, LIU presented three new possible identities to their student body: Eagles, Falcons, and Sharks. They let the students vote for their favorite and, on May 15, 2019, “Sharks” was announced as the winner.

Here, have some Shark Facts.

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1. This school was named for, you guessed it, C. W. Post, whom you may or may not know as the founder of Post Consumer Brands, manufacturer of several popular cereals such as Raisin Bran and Honey Bunches of Oats. LIU named the campus for Post because his daughter, Marjorie, sold them the property they eventually built it on.

Marjorie was also the original owner of Mar-a-Lago, a property she gifted to the National Park Service upon her death in 1973. The NPS couldn’t really do anything with it because it was in the flight path of a nearby airport, so they transferred it back to the Post estate in 1981, and that’s who Donald Trump bought it from in 1985. The second half of this footnote is neither here nor there; I just went down a rabbit hole.