Name-a-Day Calendar, October 20: Weber State Wildcats

Page 348 of 365

Chosen in: c. 1925

Chosen by: Standard-Examiner sportswriter Al Warden

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The school that is now Weber State University was founded as a junior college in 1889 and began playing football in 1902. Their teams were originally called the Weberites if they were called by any nickname at all, which was rare.

At some point in the mid-1920s, when the school was known as Weber College, came a football practice that is today etched into Weber State lore. As the story goes, an unnamed player retorted that star back Wally Morris was playing soft, like a pussycat. Team captain Monk Holliday, standing up for Morris, clapped back at the other player, saying: “he’s no pussycat; he’s a wildcat”. Morris immediately gained the nickname “Wildcat”, by which he was almost exclusively known from that point forward.

Not long afterwards, the media expanded the “Wildcat” nickname to the entire Weber team. According to the university, the first to do this was Al Warden, a sportswriter for the Standard-Examiner, a daily newspaper in Weber State’s hometown of Ogden.¹

I couldn’t track down the article in which Warden first did this, but the university claims that he called the players “scrappy as a bunch of Wildcats”. The first time Weber’s yearbook, Acorn, refers to their own teams as the Wildcats is in the 1926 edition, so I’m left to assume that Warden’s article was most likely penned during that school year’s football season in fall 1925.

It didn’t take the community much convincing to adopt the “Wildcats” nickname, as “Weber Wildcats” was alliterative and catchy. College president Aaron Tracy thought the nickname was demeaning and instead wanted his school’s teams to be called the Lions, but the community’s love for “Wildcats” won out. It helped that bobcats are native to the area and lions have been extinct in North America for millennia.

Weber College became Weber State College in 1962, switching to a four-year curriculum two years later. It was upgraded to university status in 1991 and today sports a costumed bobcat mascot named Waldo.

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1. Warden is a bit of a local legend, as his Utah sportswriting career ended up lasting about half a century.