Why is ithaca the bombers

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Proposed mascots in the past have included a unicorn, a rooster and a fighter pilot. But none has been anointed the face of IC. The college has simply remained without a mascot.

In November of , Ithaca College tried to change that. An initiative led by President Tom Rochon generated hundreds of mascot proposals. For months, the campus debated the possibilities. Click on the question to find your answer. Beginning in , newspapers exploded with use of the term.

Regional newspapers, especially the Syracuse Post-Standard, began using the Bomber name more frequently and more exclusively than they ever had before. By the s, the name was established, and the college teams became the Bombers as they are still today. While these reporter references to the Bombers support the theory that the term was coined by local journalists, other occurrences complicate things and bring in the second origin theory. According to his manuscript, Potter credits Ithaca Journal reporter Harold Jansen with creating the name.

Bower said Jansen was an acquaintance of both Potter and Harcourt and a reporter for the Ithaca Journal in and the Syracuse Journal before joining the college. From what the archives show, Jansen was a sports writer who often covered events at the college.

However, as the baseball season started up in the spring of , Jansen begins to reference the Bombers. Jansen is the connection between the two theories, but Bower said she discredits the theory that Jansen is the founder of the term.

According to the archives the college possesses, it is true that Jansen was not the first to use the term and therefore did not coin the term himself. However, Jansen certainly created a trend with his usage of the nickname in his articles. Unlike Bower, others stand by the notion that the baseball team inspired the nickname. Although his father was a member of the baseball, basketball and soccer teams during his time at the college, Wood said the Bomber legacy began solely in baseball.

Wood was sure that the baseball teams of and were considered the Bombers, but he was not positive about other sports teams. He supports the idea that the term began with the baseball team, consequently sticking and spreading to the other sports, but he also helped bust another theory about the Bomber name that proved to be a myth. Wood disagreed. Some thought the Bomber had a negative connotation and disliked that students often represented the Bomber with militaristic images.

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