Name-a-Day Calendar, September 3: Toledo Rockets

Page 301 of 365

Chosen in: 1923

Chosen by: An unnamed Pittsburgh sportswriter via Toledo student worker James Neal

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The school that is now the University of Toledo was originally founded as a vocational school in 1872 before growing and expanding its curriculum enough to become “Toledo University” in 1914.¹ Intercollegiate athletics began shortly after the school earned university status, with men’s basketball taking the court in 1915 and football hitting the gridiron in 1917.

These first teams had no official nickname, but went by several unofficial monikers. When they weren’t being called by their “Blue and Gold” color scheme, they were called some combination of “Munies” (they were a municipal institution), “Dwyer’s Boys” (after football coach James Dwyer from 1923–1925), “Commodores” (after Commodore Perry; no, the other one), and a few other one-off nicknames that probably don’t make any sense if you’re not from Toledo.²

On September 29, 1923, Dwyer’s Boys traveled to Pittsburgh to face a heavily favored Carnegie Tech squad. In the press box at Tech Field, the local Steel City sportswriters asked Toledo student worker James Neal what his team’s nickname was and were shocked when he answered that they didn’t officially have one. They then put him on the spot and asked him to make one up. Toledo had outperformed expectations in the game by “only” losing 32-12, so Neal christened his team the “Skyrockets”. A local sportswriter shortened this to “Rockets” to save space, then rolled with it. It took a few years for word to spread, but by 1926, several print sources were regularly calling Toledo’s teams the Rockets.

Today, Toledo’s mascot is a slick costumed astronaut named Rocky, but their mascot history has included its fair share of funky-lookin’ rockets.

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1. The switch to “University of Toledo” would come in 1967.

2. Example: “Bancroft Highwaymen” – the school was (and is) located on Bancroft Street