Slug Matters Yeah, it’s funny, but there’s a reason generations of UCSC students have fought for the banana slug mascot BY HUGH MCCORMICK
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or Robert Sinsheimer, who served as UCSC Chancellor from 1977 to 1980, the banana slug was Voldemort. It Which Must Not Be Named had served as the unofficial mascot of his school’s co-ed teams for years, but the lowly hermaphroditic gastropod was a despised figure in Sinsheimer’s spacious office. It was 1970, only five years after UCSC’s founding, that captain of the men’s volleyball team David Van Cleve dubbed his squad the “Banana Slugs,” creating the now-famous mascot in the process. The universi-
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ty’s on-campus sports programs had begun to gain in popularity, but an institutional team name and mascot didn’t exist. UCSC’s soccer club reinvigorated the banana slug mascot in 1974 when it rocked slug t-shirts at an All-Cal tournament. The team’s comical name and even-more-comical defeat at the hands of the San Jose Spartans was noted in the San Jose Mercury News. Throughout the ’70s and into the early ’80s, the banana slug began to capture the hearts and minds of the student body. Students in all of the colleges embraced the humble, slimy and slow creature as their own—a collective rejection of the ferocious athletic competition
encouraged at many other schools. Most of the student body came to agree that campus sports and physical education—while always an important part of life at UCSC— should be based on some uncommon slug-like ideas. First and foremost, the joy of participating should always outweigh the importance of winning. And sports and athletics should be for all UCSC students, not just the superstar team members of major programs. That philosophy has been passed down through generations of classes to today’s student body, who continue to embrace it. “Sports are important for health and exercise, and for building community, but aren’t really a huge
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