Name-a-Day Calendar, November 12: Alabama State Hornets
Page 6 of 365
Chosen in: 1925
Chosen by: Unknown
Yep. Unknown. That’ll be rare in this series, I promise, but I searched far and wide and was unable to confirm who coined the name “Hornets” or how it became official.
What I do know is that, in 1925, print sources began referring to the sports teams of what was then the Alabama State Normal School for Colored Students as the Hornets, rather than the Tigers, which they had used as their nickname for several years before then.
Alabama State didn’t publish a yearbook until 1928 and it didn’t publish a student newspaper until 1948, so there’s no conveniently chronicled history of the school from the time when they made the switch. In any case, we’ve got quite enough Tigers in college athletics,1 so I’ll consider myself grateful.
Check out some historic recaps of Alabama State’s football rivalry with Tuskegee here.
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Currently, 12 Division I schools use the tiger as their mascot. That number was 13 before Savannah State dropped back to Division II in 2019.
the southern hbcus reached tiger critical mass and alabama state automatically decayed into the hornets