RE: Explain your School's Mascott!
Why The Thundering Herd? (from Herdzone.com)
The Thundering Herd is American folklore ... as old as the buffalo (actually, American Bison) that roam the western plains. The Herd once provided nearly every substance needed for human survival, including food, clothing, tools and weapons. The Herd still provides Marshall University's athletic teams with their nickname.
"Thundering Herd" has long been recognized by sports enthusiasts as one of the great, distinctive nicknames in college athletics. But on several occasions throughout Marshall's history other nicknames have been suggested and, on occasion, been hung on the school.
The first nickname of record is "Indians", a moniker bestowed upon the pre-1900 athletic teams and due to the historic ties of the Cherokee and Shawnee tribes in the area). By about 1910, sparked by the color of team uniforms (first using Green and White in 1903, a nice change from earlier Black and Blue), "Big Green" began to be used in reference to Marshall athletics. Criticized by some from its inception as being boring, Big Green was soon ripe for replacement. "Normalists" was also used as Marshall College was the State Normal School from 1867-1920, when it became a four-year college).
When Huntington Herald-Dispatch sportswriter and former Marshall baseball coach Carl "Duke" Ridgley referred to a late-1920s squad as a "Thundering Herd," after a then-current movie based on the 1925 Zane Gray novel and soon to follow silent movie of the same name - as well as the national championship teams of USC in the era - it caught on quickly. Both "Thundering Herd" and "Big Green" have been used in reference to Marshall ever since.
It didn't take long, however, for Thundering Herd to draw criticism as well. Some folks thought it inappropriate since it came with connotations of the western plains and didn't represent West Virginia or founding father John Marshall. One suggested nickname, which never caught on, would have honored John Marshall by calling the school's teams the "Judges" by the sports editor of The Parthenon, Marshall's student newspaper.
The evening paper in Huntington was The Huntington Advertiser, and former Marshall team manager and sports editor of the HA was Fred Burns, and he and Ridgely had quite a rivalry in print. HA writer Doug "Dug" Freutal (a former Marshall star for ther 1919 8-0 team) in 1933 started referring to Marshall teams as the "Boogercats" (referring to Scotland's Bogie Cats, a "fleet, elusive, courageous" animal) and some other scribes followed in using that nickname. Freutal complained that "Thundering Herd" made one think of "cows stampeding down a country road," but many people thought "Boogercats" stirred up worse images than that, and as a former Herd player he brought that to the argument.
The "Boogercat" controversy sparked the Marshall alumni association to hold a special meeting, in which a vote was taken to refer to the school teams as the "Thundering Herd" for the time being - but that a study should be undertaken to find a mascot that had a connection with the school or West Virginia. In 1931, a live Bison was purchased from the Marland 101 Ranch in Oklahoma for the school.
Despite Burn's and Freutal's attempts to keep "Boogercat" alive for the next couple of years, "Thundering Herd" and "Big Green" remained the commonly used nicknames. In 1958 the Marshall student body, without input from the faculty, administration or alumni, decided that two nicknames wouldn't do and held a vote to settle the issue. Along with "Thundering Herd" and "Big Green", one group of students bought a turkey as a suggested mascot and promoted the name "Green Gobblers."
The students voted "Big Green" as the nickname, but the media continued to use "Thundering Herd" to refer to the teams. "Green Gobblers" flew away.
In the fall of 1964 now Marshall University President Stewart Smith appointed a faculty-student committee to suggest a more permanent nickname, feeling that "Big Green" denoted no action and was not appropriately symbolic. The nine-member committee narrowed its field to "Big Green," "Thundering Herd" and "Rams," which had been suggested by Huntington businessman Leonard Samworth, a past president of the alumni association. He even suggested the mascot name be "Sam the Ram."
On January 5, 1965, over 85 percent of the Marshall students picked "Thundering Herd" above the others and chose to keep "Marco" as the name of the buffalo/American Bison as the official mascot (even though MARCO stood for MARshall COllege, and the school became a University in March of 1961) and "Green and White" as the official school colors. The athletic fundraising organization took on the name The Big Green Scholarship Foundation, and "Sam the Ram" was left by the wayside along with "Judges", "Indians," "Normalists" and, of course, "Boogercats."
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