UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs
A banana slug is a slimy yellow mollusk that slides across the ground, leaving an oily residue wherever it goes. It is also the name of UC Santa Cruz’s athletic team. When Santa Cruz joined NCAA’s Division III in 1981, athletic officials presented the school with its first official mascot: the sea lion. But the students were having none of it; they wanted to be called the banana slugs. After five years of slug vs. sea lion rivalry, the slug won out and it has been the official mascot ever since.
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The University of Hawaii Rainbow Warriors
Back in 1923, after Hawaii’s football team—then the Fighting Deans—won an epic gridiron battle against Oregon State, a rainbow allegedly appeared in the sky. After that, every time a rainbow arced over the field, the team is said to have won, prompting a name change to the Rainbow Warriors. In 2000, however, the school scrapped the rainbow insignia for a block-letter “H” and officially changed the football team’s name to the plain old Warriors. “That logo really put a stigma on our program at times,” athletic director Hugh Yoshida said in a radio interview at the time. “It’s part of the gay community, their flags and so forth. Some of the student athletes had some feelings in regard to that.” The remark elicited similarly strong “feelings” from many in the campus gay community. But Yoshida said his quote had been taken out of context: he had also noted that the team name was easily confused with Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition and NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon’s Rainbow Warrior racing team. (And let’s not forget the Greenpeace vessel of the same name, infamously sunk by French commandos in 1985.) The university nonetheless issued an apology “to anyone who was offended.” Other teams were allowed to pick their own monikers: baseball went with just Rainbows; basketball, tennis, and swimming and diving chose Rainbow Warriors; and golf and volleyball followed football to become the Warriors.
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