Let's Go, Grizzles. No, Clamdiggers. No, Sock-Eyes. No, Sky Pilots. Wait. Loggers!

Alumni, Campus, Arches

How did Puget Sound sports teams get their nickname? It's complicated.

In the late 1970s, half a century after his own playing days were over, a former Puget Sound football player named Charlie Brady ’24 would drop by Baker Stadium on occasion to watch Logger football practices. He was retired, nearing the age of 80, and living within walking distance of campus. Brian Threlkeld ’83, an offensive lineman at the time, remembers Brady. “We’d all shake hands with him as we trotted out to practice, and he loved it.” In 1980 the team even invited Brady to fly with them to the season opener at Chico State, a 37-0 Logger win. Brady wrote a poem in thanks, and one of the coaches pinned it up in the locker room.

The players didn’t know much about Brady—“just that he was an old-time Logger, and deeply devoted to his alma mater,” Threlkeld says. They certainly didn’t realize that Brady had played on the very first Puget Sound football team to be called the Loggers. In fact, Brady may have an even bigger claim to fame: He might just be the man responsible for the Logger nickname.

This year, Puget Sound sports teams mark 100 years of being known as the Loggers. The name is a point of pride, evoking toughness. “Loggers are a deep-rooted, loyal community who symbolize strength and perseverance,” says Athletic Director Amy Hackett. The name is also distinctive—no other NCAA team has the nickname. But how did the name come about? Whose idea was it? There’s no official answer to that question, nothing definitive in the athletic annals, no one still alive who can say exactly how it happened.

Women's basketball team, 1912–1913. — *The women’s basketball team of 1912–13 outside the gym at Sixth and Sprague, the campus’ location at the time.*

In recent years, Threlkeld—now an attorney living in New York—has been trying to solve that mystery. He has spent hours digging through online sources, talked with football old-timers and Tacoma-area historians, visited the archives in Collins Memorial Library. Based on his sleuthing, he’s pinpointed the year that students adopted the Logger name: 1923. But the source of the name remains an enigma; in fact, Threlkeld found two conflicting tales about how it started. And that’s the enduring mystery: Which version is correct?

Puget Sound has fielded sports teams almost since its founding in 1888. A news item in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer from May 6, 1893, told of the Puget Sound University General Athletic Association sending a team to Seattle to compete in field events. Threlkeld found evidence of a football team as early as 1894—it played three games that season, against Port Townsend AC, Vashon College, and the Maple Leaf Club.

Photos from the turn of the 20th century show that the teams’ uniforms—when there were uniforms at all—were plain, with no nickname. That’s because, for the first 32 years of the school’s history, Puget Sound teams had no nickname. The Trail often referred to sports teams as simply “the Maroon and White.” The Tacoma newspaper, the Daily Ledger, even called the team “the Wesleyan lads,” a reference to the school’s Methodist roots.

Finally, in 1920, Puget Sound sports teams got a nickname: the Grizzlies. But the name never really took off, and three years later, students scrapped it and instead voted to become the Loggers, a name that has endured for a century.

Brian Threlkeld learned a bit of this lore when he was still a student-athlete. He played offensive tackle and center from 1978–82 under Coach Ron Simonson. During the 1980 season, the Tacoma News Tribune happened to profile Charlie Brady, the older gentleman who often stopped by to watch practice. Reading the article, Threlkeld learned that Brady had enrolled at Puget Sound in 1918, left school the following year for financial reasons, and eventually returned, serving as humor reporter for The Trail and lettering in both football and basketball.

The News Tribune story also suggested that Brady’s father, John, was the one who coined the name “Loggers.” Brady and some of his teammates had spent their summers working on John Brady’s logging operation in Ashford, Wash., in the Nisqually Valley west of Mount Rainier, and one day they were discussing the need for a new team nickname. You work as loggers, Brady’s father pointed out; why not call yourselves that when competing for your school?

The News Tribune repeated the tale in an article about Charlie Brady’s death two years later. And if it weren’t for Threlkeld, that might be the story that everyone believes to this day.

In 2013, a group of former football players and coaches from the “green and gold era” were planning a campus reunion, and Bill Linnenkohl ’76, a former All-America linebacker, wondered if anyone had a list of Logger football All-Americans. Threlkeld knew that the existing list was incomplete, so he volunteered to do some digging. In the course of that research, he learned that Archives & Special Collections at Collins Memorial Library had digitized many of the back issues of The Trail and put them online—and that reminded him of Charlie Brady.

1901 football team in uniform. — This photo of the 1901 football team ran in *Ye Recorde*, a predecessor to *The Trail*. Puget Sound sports teams at that time lacked a nickname—that wouldn’t come for another 20 years.

Curious to verify the story he had seen in the News Tribune years earlier, Threlkeld started searching back issues of The Trail, as well as old editions of Tamanawas (once they, too, were put online). He searched on the word “logger,” read game summaries from assorted sports, looked for pictures of athletes in uniform. A tiny mention in the 1920 Tamanawas caught his eye: In a calendar looking back on the events of the school year, he saw four dates listed for February 1920:

3. Registration for second semester.
5. College adopts nickname of “Grizzlies.”
21. C. P. S. wins from Bellingham 19 to 17.
24. The Costume Ball, er-er Party was a great success last night.

It was the first known mention of “Grizzlies”—or any sports nickname, for that matter. In that same edition, the yearbook offered a new Grizzlies-themed cheer that it hoped would be “conducive of arousing college spirit.” It was an odd cheer by today’s standards; here’s a sampling:

With a bevo and a bivo
With a bevo-bivo-bum-bum.
Johnny got a rat trap
Bigger than a cat trap,
Johnny got a cat trap
Bigger than a rat trap,
Bum! Bum! Dum!
Cannibal, cannibal,
Zis boom bah.
Grizzlies, Grizzlies,
Rah! Rah! Rah!
Boola, boo, Boola-boom.
Grizzlies, Grizzlies,
Give them room!

The following year, Tamanawas sported an embossed grizzly bear on its cover. But The Trail rarely called sports teams the Grizzlies in its sports coverage, and the name never really caught on. “Most students, including the varsity athletes, apparently were indifferent to the nickname,” Threlkeld says. The era of sports teams being called the “Grizzlies” proved to be short-lived—just three years.

(The Grizz mascot who patrols the sidelines today is a relative youngster, having debuted in 2006. ASUPS officers Alex Israel ’06 and Ryan McAninch ’06 created Grizz to replace the previous mascot, a lumberjack. Israel and McAninch named the new mascot Grizz as a nod to the early-1920s nickname.)

*This 1951 photo of an unidentified baseball player—or coach?—may be the oldest existing photo of anyone in a Logger uniform.*

How, then, did the Grizzlies morph into the Loggers? The sources that Threlkeld could find made no reference to the story of Charlie Brady and his lumberjack teammates as the source of Puget Sound’s new nickname. Instead, with the help of then-archivist Adriana Flores ’13, Threlkeld found a brief mention in The Trail dated Jan. 10, 1923, stating that the college needed a new nickname. “Get busy and hand in your suggestion to the Athletic Manager,” the article instructed, promising that students would then vote on the names at an upcoming assembly.

A week later, The Trail reported that nine names had come in: Clamdiggers, Whales, Seals, Sock-Eyes, Steelheads, Skippers, Sky Pilots, Pilots, and Loggers. A week after that, student Preston Wright ’28 wrote an opinion piece lobbying for Loggers: “It is a name that implies strength, fearlessness, conquest, and rough, whole-hearted friendship,” he wrote, adding that the name lent itself to such symbols as the “two-bitted ax, the peevee, or the crosscut saw.”

If the promised athletic assembly and student vote ever took place, the student newspaper seems not to have reported on it. But mentions of “Loggers” started appearing in the paper almost immediately. “Loggers Lose to Camp Lewis,” read the headline to a basketball story in the Feb. 14, 1923, Trail.

For the rest of that spring, the newspaper regularly referred to the college’s basketball, baseball, and track & field teams as the Loggers. Local newspapers also picked up on the name: On Oct. 26, 1923, the Vashon Island News-Record reported that the University of Washington football team would take the field “against the College of Puget Sound Loggers” the following Saturday in Tacoma. “The Loggers this season have a good team, one of the best that has represented the College of Puget Sound in years, but they can hardly expect to cope with the brilliant Washington team.” (Sure enough, UW beat Puget Sound that day, 24-0.)

So what really happened? Did Charlie Brady’s father originate the Loggers nickname, as the News Tribune twice claimed? Or did it start with a poll by the student newspaper?

It’s possible that both stories could be true. Charlie Brady and Preston Wright could have known each other as students; moreover, Wright was a savvy older student who had considerable work experience and happened to be sports editor of The Trail. It has crossed Threlkeld’s mind that Brady told Wright about his father’s idea and that Wright responded, I know a way to make it happen. “That’s wholly speculative, of course,” Threlkeld says. “But it might help account for the two versions.”

We may never know. But Threlkeld is actually OK with that. For one, there’s still the pride that comes from being the only NCAA team in the country to use the name. That’s not to discount the Lewis-Clark Valley Loggers, a football club associated with Lewis-Clark State College in Idaho, but they’re considered only an NCAA “affiliate.” (Puget Sound beat those Loggers, 20-0, in an exhibition game at Baker Field earlier this season.) Lincoln Land Community College in Illinois competes as the Loggers in the National Junior College Athletic Association. But no NCAA team at the Division III level or above claims the Logger name. Only Puget Sound.

Beyond that, Threlkeld is just happy to have figured out when the name originated, if not exactly how. “I’m glad we discovered this, and in time to mark the centennial,” he says. “And I’m glad that I knew one of those original Loggers.” He regrets that he never had a chance to ask Charlie Brady or others of that era to tell their story. But he’s happy for what he does know. “When you’re out there playing, the name isn’t something that helps you win a game,” Threlkeld says. “But these things are significant, because they help develop a sense of who we are.”

A postscript about Charlie Brady: After graduating from Puget Sound, he spent a few years teaching, then returned to the family business, working in the timber industry until his retirement. Because, after all: Once a Logger, always a Logger.

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