Name-a-Day Calendar, November 16: Appalachian State Mountaineers
Day 10 of 365
Chosen in: 1929, I think
Chosen by: Unclear
Most modern-day sources say Appalachian State University has always used “Mountaineers” as its athletic nickname and, from what I can tell, that seems to be more or less correct. Aside from a one-off basketball game against Lenoir–Rhyne in 1920, they began playing intercollegiate basketball in 1925-26 and intercollegiate football in 1928-29. The earliest reference I could find of their sports teams being referred to as the Mountaineers is in their 1930 Rhododendron yearbook, which uses the moniker to refer to all sports teams, but puts the word in quotation marks almost every time, which suggests to me that the practice was new at the time and hadn’t quite caught on yet. Yearbooks from prior years go into detail about the basketball and football seasons, but don’t refer to the teams by any nickname.
It’s unclear to me whether the yearbook editorial staff coined “Mountaineers” and it just stuck or if someone else came up with it and the staff used an already popularized name. In any case, I feel confident in pinpointing the 1929-30 season as the first in which what was then Appalachian State Teachers College commonly used the Mountaineers nickname.
The school’s iconic mountaineer mascot would come 12 years later. Check out this video to learn more about how Yosef came to be.
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