Name-a-Day Calendar, October 14: Virginia Tech Hokies
Page 342 of 365
Chosen in: 1896, sort of; common usage as official nickname dates to early 1980s
Chosen by: Student O.M. Stull in a roundabout fashion
The Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College was founded in 1872 and began playing football in 1892, originally with no official nickname.
In 1896, the school rebranded as the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College and Polytechnic Institute, though the “Agricultural and Mechanical College” portion of the name was almost never used in any capacity and the school quickly adopted “VPI” as its initials. The school held a student body contest to see who could write the best cheer to incorporate the new branding. The winning student was O.M. Stull, who wrote the following chant:
“Hoki, Hoki, Hoki, Hy!
Techs, Techs, VPI!
Sol-a-rex, Sol-a-rah,
Polytechs Vir-gin-i-a!
Rae, Ri, VPI!”
This chant is still in use today, though a few modifications were quickly made: an “e” was added to the end of “Hoki”, the “s” was removed from “(Poly)techs”,1 and the line “Team, Team, Team!” was added to the end of the chant. This the origin of the word “Hokie”, which Stull admitted was nonsense with no inherent meaning. It would eventually become the official nickname of Virginia Tech athletics, but not for a while; we’ll get there.
The school’s first official nickname was “Gobblers”, which sources seem to agree came about circa 1908, which is coincidentally when the men’s basketball team debuted. It doesn’t seem to have ever been confirmed who coined this nickname or how, but the most commonly given explanation as to why is that VPI student athletes often “gobbled up their food”.2 You’d think this was a metaphor for their dominating the competition, but it was evidently meant literally; they were just really ferocious eaters.
Several turkey mascots, live and costumed, followed over the next several decades. The name of the school officially became the shortened “Virginia Polytechnic Institute” in 1944, then “and State University” was tacked onto the end in 1970.
Soon after this second change came two other branding changes: 1) “Virginia Tech” began seeing usage as a common name for the university, beginning with sports and eventually branching out to other aspects of university life,3 and 2) the sports teams briefly became known as the Fighting Gobblers rather than just the Gobblers.
According to research by NCAA.com, the first print reference to “Hokies” as a sporting nickname rather than just as a part of the school chant came in the Richmond Times-Dispatch following VPI football’s upset win over Clemson in 1954. Usage in this context was sparing for almost three decades after this, but picked up in around 1980 and gradually overtook “Fighting Gobblers” as the preferred Virginia Tech sports brand. This has remained the case to the present day.
A Virginia Tech mascot called the HokieBird (which, like previous mascots, is just a costumed turkey), first debuted on September 26, 1981, at the football game against Wake Forest. The current HokieBird mascot looks like this.
Previous page: Virginia Cavaliers
Next page: VMI Keydets
Find every page at the Name-a-Day Calendar hub!
This one doesn’t seem to have been immediate and some sources still include it in the modern chant.
Other explanations include that football players often verbally gobbled like turkeys when chanted at and that VPI’s Thanksgiving 1907 football win over North Carolina was a “taking of the turkey”.
This usage was officialized around 1990.