Name-a-Day Calendar, September 21: UMass Lowell River Hawks

Page 319 of 365

Chosen in: 1994

Chosen by: Student Chad Dooley and a university committee via student body vote

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Along the Merrimack River in Lowell, Massachusetts, two institutions of higher education opened in 1897: Lowell Normal School on the south bank of the river and Lowell Textile School on the north bank. These two schools grew and evolved independently of one another for almost 80 years, with Lowell Normal School becoming Lowell Teachers College in 1932 and then Lowell State College in 1959, while Lowell Textile School became Lowell Technological Institute in 1953. Lowell State and Lowell Tech merged to form the University of Lowell in 1975 and the merged school joined the University of Massachusetts system in 1991.

I get all that out of the way first because this article is going to focus on the history of Lowell Tech prior to the merger. Both schools naturally ran their own athletics departments before 1975, sporting a healthy rivalry with each other to boot, but in the end, Lowell Tech’s athletics programs were officially kept in the merger while Lowell State’s were dropped and merged into Lowell Tech’s.

Lowell Textile began playing sports with the debut of men’s basketball in 1902 but their teams had no common nickname until 1941, when print sources began referring to them as the Millmen (as in a textile mill). Then, in spring 1948, the student body voted for the terrier as their school mascot and their teams resultantly became known as the Terriers.

This lasted until the 1975 merger, at which point the combined athletics department decided to nickname themselves the Chiefs and introduce a Native American mascot, a bit of a head-scratcher given the nearby University of Massachusetts Amherst had just decided to drop their Native American “Redmen” branding three years earlier after being told it was offensive.

You’d assume this didn’t last very long, and you’d be partially correct. Within a few years, several people began making some noise to demand a nickname change, but the university didn’t have any serious conversations on the matter until they joined the University of Massachusetts system in 1991. At first, they tried changing the mascot but keeping the nickname. This resulted in some wacky stuff, most notably a mascot that took the form of a human-sized hockey puck with the words “Charlie Chief” and a Native American facial silhouette drawn onto it. After this inevitably became the butt of many jokes, the university formed a committee of 15 students, faculty, and staff in 1993 to discuss whether it was time to retire the Chiefs branding. By a 14-1 vote, they decided that yes, it was.

Throughout spring 1994, UMass Lowell and their committee solicited suggestions for a new nickname from students and community members. They ended up receiving 154 suggestions, which they whittled down to the four finalists that would grace the student ballot: Lighting, Ospreys, Raging Rapids, and River Hawks. The winner, of course, was “River Hawks”, which technically wasn’t ever submitted to the committee as a suggestion. Student Chad Dooley suggested “Hawks” and the committee tacked the word “River” onto it to evoke the Merrimack River, the waterway that once split two separate campuses but now runs through the middle of just the one.

Today, UMass Lowell’s mascot is a costumed “river hawk” named Rowdy. Here he is getting fired.

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