Name-a-Day Calendar, September 24: UNC Greensboro Spartans
Page 322 of 365
Chosen in: 1967
Chosen by: The inaugural men’s basketball team
The State Normal and Industrial School first opened in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1892. For its first 70 or so years, it was almost exclusively a women’s school, and during that time, intercollegiate athletic competition was pretty much nonexistent.
During the Great Depression in 1932, when men were very briefly allowed to enroll at what was then the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina, they formed a basketball team and called themselves the Tom Cats. But men were removed from the school the following year and so was the team. Aside from that, women’s teams popped up every now and then, but they weren’t very well organized or funded by the school, an unfortunate reality for many women’s sports programs prior to the 1972 implementation of Title IX.
The school began admitting men full-time in 1963, simultaneously changing its name to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). The same year, a permanent women’s basketball program began play; I could find no mention of a nickname or mascot. That wouldn’t come until 1967, when the men’s basketball program came to be. According to then-men’s athletics director Frank Pleasants, the inaugural men’s basketball team decided to call themselves the Spartans because they “were looking for a name which had a masculine ring, and one which had associated with it the tradition of courage”. Despite this implied connotation, women’s sports teams at UNCG also started calling themselves the Spartans, and both sexes use the moniker to this day.
UNCG’s mascot is a costumed Spartan named Spiro.
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