Name-a-Day Calendar, September 17: UIC Flames
Page 315 of 365
Chosen in: 1982
Chosen by: The student body
The teams we now know as the UIC Flames took a circuitous route to both the “UIC” name and the “Flames” nickname.
The modern origin of the school came immediately following World War II, when the University of Illinois responded to the G.I. Bill and the resultant boom in higher education by establishing what they first thought would be a temporary, two-year branch campus in Chicago. That campus, the Chicago Undergraduate Division (often known simply as “Navy Pier”, after its location), opened in 1946 and began playing intercollegiate sports the following year. Taking inspiration from their parent campus, their teams were known as the Chi-Illini.
So many students enrolled at this campus that the State of Illinois changed course and established a four-year campus in its place. This campus opened in 1965 in its current location on the southwest corner of the Circle Interchange (now the Jane Byrne Interchange) between I-90/94 and I-290. This campus was originally slated to be called the University of Illinois at Congress Circle, as I-290 was known as the Congress Expressway while the campus was under construction, but the road was renamed the Dwight D. Eisenhower Expressway just before the campus opened, so the State hastily renamed it the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle.
While the university had this name, their sporting nickname was “Chikas”. Their website claims that this was “in homage to the Chikasaw [sic] nation”, which famously resided in what is now northern Mississippi before being pushed to southern Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears. This makes no sense, so I dug a little deeper and found the following unsourced statement from the “UIC Flames” Wikipedia article.
“In 1965 the Chicago Illini moved to Harrison and Halsted to represent the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle campus. Upon this move the team became known as the Chicas, a shortening of Chicago; this was changed [to] ‘Chikas’ due to taunting from other teams knocking them (‘chicas’ means ‘girls’ in Spanish). This spelling was rationalized as being a reference to the Chickasaw tribe.”
A few unofficial sources I found that predate this statement seem to indicate that it’s correct, but I couldn’t pin down anything ironclad. In any case, the “Chikas” nickname seems to have been abandoned after the university dissolved its football team in 1973, in large part because many considered the unsanctioned association with an unrelated Native American tribe 750 miles away to be in poor taste.
Chicago Circle went without an official nickname for about a decade until it merged with the University of Illinois at the Medical Center, also in Chicago, to form the University of Illinois Chicago in 1982. At this time, the student body finally took an honest look at what their identity should be and decided to call themselves the Flames, playing off the Great Chicago Fire. As far as I can tell, it’s not clear who originally suggested this moniker.
It’s hard to make a mascot out of literal fire, so UIC instead opted for one that breathes it. Since either 1986 or the early 1990s (depending on which UIC webpage I ask), their mascot has been a fire-breathing dragon named Sparky.
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