Name-a-Day Calendar, September 28: USC Upstate Spartans

Page 326 of 365

Chosen in: 2004

Chosen by: University administration

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The school that is now the University of South Carolina Upstate (USC Upstate) was originally the two-year Spartanburg Regional Campus. It was founded in 1967 and expanded to become the four-year USC Spartanburg in 1975.

The school has been playing intercollegiate men’s basketball since its first year in existence. Their first official nickname came in 1971, when they dubbed themselves the Rifles in honor of a local militia who won the Battle of Cowpens less than 10 miles northeast of Spartanburg during the American Revolution.

This lasted for over three decades and ended in June 2004, when the school successfully petitioned the University of South Carolina Board of Regents to change their name to USC Upstate “in order to signify expanded vision, mission and goals for the University”. I can’t take this announcement seriously because it doesn’t use an Oxford comma, but unfortunately, minor syntax errors don’t prevent major institutional change.

This shift was much to the chagrin of the city of Spartanburg, but the university had a compromise. Until this point, the name of the institution belonged to Spartanburg and their athletics nickname belonged to greater Upstate South Carolina. Now that the institutional name reflected the broader region, USC Upstate vowed to switch to an athletics nickname that better reflected Spartanburg specifically.

Then they put up a poll online and the options…did not accomplish this goal. Voters could choose between “Blazers”, “Ravens”, and “Storm”. What do any of those have to do with Upstate South Carolina? We’ll never know, as the university disregarded the poll and selected none of them.

Instead, some administrators, largely spurred by athletics director Mike Hall, pushed for the nickname with perhaps the most obvious connection: Spartans. This push was successful and the university made the announcement in July 2004.

After the switch, USC Upstate tested a mascot that was a costumed black bear in Spartan garb, but this proved unpopular. Sooner or later, we got the costumed Sparty, which a young Three Man Weave once called “douchebaggery incarnate”. Maybe USC Upstate will get it right someday.

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