Name-a-Day Calendar, October 15: VMI Keydets
Page 343 of 365
Chosen in: The 1930s
Chosen by: Nobody seems to know for sure
The Virginia Military Institute (VMI) was established in 1839 and began playing football in 1872. Their teams had no official nickname at first.
The first nickname used to refer to VMI’s teams was “Flying Squadron”, which institute sources claim resulted from a 1917 football game against North Carolina. Those two teams didn’t play each other in that year, so they meant to refer either to a game against North Carolina in a surrounding year or to the game against the school we now know as NC State in 1917. In any case, the nickname gradually gained popularity to the point of being nearly ubiquitous in 1920, but slowly fell out of use after that season.
At some point in the 1930s, official sources began calling VMI’s teams the Keydets, an apparent nonsense word of unclear origin. According to VMI, “the United States Military Academy claims that it was a word used to denote the gray of the standard uniform of a cadet”, but they seem to be the only ones pushing this origin story. The more popular story within the VMI community, despite VMI itself calling it “less factual”, is that the word is simply “cadet” pronounced in a Southern drawl.
VMI debuted a kangaroo mascot named TD Bound in 1948. The previous year, two cheerleaders had seen a kangaroo on the cover of a magazine and noted how rarely the animal was selected as a mascot, so they made a recommendation to the faculty that the kangaroo be adopted as VMI’s mascot. The mascot’s name was quickly changed to Moe so that it could better represent all sports, not just football. Originally, a live kangaroo served the Keydets, but a costumed Moe took over in 1972.
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