Name-a-Day Calendar, November 4: Youngstown State Penguins
Page 363 of 365
Chosen in: 1933; became official in 1938
Chosen by: There are conflicting stories, but it probably came from the fans
The school that is now Youngstown State University dates back to 1908, first sponsoring intercollegiate athletics in 1927, when they formed a men’s basketball team. This team had no nickname until February 9, 1933.1
On that day, one of two things happened that gave the team its “Penguins” nickname. They were playing a road game at West Liberty State Teachers College2 in West Liberty, West Virginia, and all accounts seem to agree that it was a cold and snowy day. The bus that transported the team 80 miles south to West Liberty was unheated. The first nickname origin story has it that players and fans passed time on this trip by discussing what their team could be called and some unspecified person suggested “Penguins” to mass fanfare.
The second (and more popular) origin story says that the nickname came from the team’s arrival at the West Liberty gym. The visitors’ locker room was also unheated, so Youngstown’s players were essentially human blocks of ice by the time they got dressed to enter the gym and play the game. So, as they took the floor to play in an athletic event, they had to find a way to warm up quickly. As the story goes, they started waddling around the floor and swinging their arms like penguins, leading fans to call them the Penguins. Youngstown proceeded to lose the game 33-28, but the comparison to flightless birds stuck with the fanbase and the student body.
The team continued to be called the Penguins, but it remained unofficial until the school started a football team in 1938. Only then did the student body consider adopting an actual mascot, at which point a student body poll concluded that the “Penguins” identity should stick full-time.3 The next year, the Mahoning County Natural Resources Board purchased a live penguin, Pete, to serve as the school’s first mascot.4
This all happened when the school was called Youngstown College. It became Youngstown University in 1955 and Youngstown State University in 1967, marking 1967 as the first year the teams were known as the Youngstown State Penguins.
Today, Youngstown State is represented by two costumed penguin mascots: Pete and Penny Penguin. They enjoy chowing down on delicious burgers at Youngstown State men’s basketball games.
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The university claims that some people called them the “Wye Collegians”, but “Wye” in this case is just a spelling-out of “Y” for “Youngstown”, so this moniker basically just calls them Youngstown students.
No relation to Liberty University, thankfully
NCAA.com’s Andy Wittry has a fuller history of Youngstown State’s “Penguins” nickname and mascot.
Youngstown had four live penguin mascots in the earlier days of the nickname. Pete was the first and he drowned in a frozen pond in 1941 while trying to catch a fish under the ice. The second and third mascots, Pete II and his partner Patricia, came shortly after Pete died; both died of pulmonary tuberculosis in 1942. This depressed the college enough to prevent another live mascot acquisition until 1968, when Pete III came to town. Youngstown State gave Pete III much safer conditions, keeping him in a glass cage and sending him to the Pittsburgh Zoo in the summers. He still died of visceral gout in 1972. That is the entire sad history of Youngstown State live penguin mascots.
Piplup