When I played my college's teams were called "The Fighting Missionaries."
Would have been very cool to play the Fighting Methodists. Another Holy War.
The name eventually gave way to our times, the fact that the school had not been religiously affiliated for over a hundred years, and the sheer impossibility of displaying "Fighting Missionaries" on a jersey with anything bigger than a 10 point font.
When the college made the change, I lobbied for the "Roo Rats" which were a kind of Whitman tradition, shrouded in post-midnight, wheatfield secrecy honored primarily by students who were science majors of some type.
Now the wheatfields are vineyards, and the team is called the Blues.
