Name-a-Day Calendar, September 30: UT Martin Skyhawks
Page 328 of 365
Chosen in: 1995
Chosen by: A mascot committee
In 1900, the Tennessee Baptist Convention was gifted a plot of land in Martin on which to found a bible school. They called it Hall-Moody Institute in honor of two locally important Baptist preachers. Originally, classes at Hall-Moody ranged from first grade to freshman year of college, but within a decade or so, the grade school was abandoned and the college was expanded for the purpose of teacher education.
Hall-Moody’s enrollment began to dwindle after this shift. Despite this, intercollegiate athletics began in 1921 with the formation of a men’s basketball team.1 This team was known as the Sky-Pilots, an old slang term for traveling preachers. Unfortunately, the enrollment issues eventually became too big to ignore, and in 1927, Hall-Moody merged into Union University in Jackson, vacating the Martin campus.
Local leaders saw a perfectly good college campus and pressured the University of Tennessee to install a branch institute there. They did, and the University of Tennessee Junior College was born. The athletics program continued and was rebranded as the Junior Volunteers, or Junior Vols for short.
During World War II, chancellor Paul Meek established a pilot training program for the U.S. Navy on his campus. This has nothing to do with sports at the college but it’ll be important later.
In 1951, the college added four-year programs and was renamed the University of Tennessee, Martin Branch. Consequently, the sports teams using a “Junior” nickname no longer made sense, so they…also called themselves the Volunteers. In cases where that was confusing (which I must assume was all of them), they were called the diminutive “Little Vols” or “Baby Vols”.
Shockingly, the school eventually got tired of this, but it wasn’t until 20 years later that they actually took action to change it. After officially becoming the University of Tennessee at Martin (UT Martin) in 1967, the wheels began to turn on finding a more suitable nickname. The university considered several nicknames and sent six to a student body vote in 1971. Students could choose between Cobras, Commanders, Hawks, Pacers, Pioneers, and Takers. They chose “Pacers”.
As the Pacers, UT Martin debuted their first mascot—or, more correctly, mascots. A costumed roadrunner named Pacer Pete debuted in January 1981, a horse named Chuckie debuted in fall 1981, and a costumed female roadrunner named Pace-Her Polly debuted at some point in the mid-1980s. At this time, UT Martin had separate athletics directors for men’s and women’s sports; Pace-Her Polly was the brainchild of women’s athletics director Bettye Giles.
Then, in 1994, UT Martin hired Benny Hollis as their first athletics director of both men’s and women’s sports. One of his first orders of business was to install a gender-neutral mascot and brand with which everyone at UT Martin could identify. In doing so, he also figured he’d shift the identity to something that paid more homage to local history. But he didn’t have any ideas on how to do this himself, so he appointed a committee of students and faculty to think up ideas.
What they came up with, announced on March 30, 1995, was “Skyhawks”. They gave three reasons. First, “Skyhawks” was a reference to Hall-Moody’s old “Sky-Pilots” in a way that made more obvious linguistic sense in a modern context. Second, it paid respect to the naval air cadets who trained at UT Martin during World War II, some of whom went on to die in the war. Last but not least, the Red-tailed Hawk is indigenous to West Tennessee.
And that was that: they were, and are, the UT Martin Skyhawks. Their mascot is a costumed skyhawk named Captain, so named because the term is gender neutral.
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Rarely for the era, a women’s basketball team also formed at some point during this decade.