Opened in 1965, the University of California Santa Cruz is a college located about 60 miles south of San Francisco in the central California city of Santa Cruz. It has an enrollment of nearly 15,000 undergraduates and 1,500 graduate students, and it is the only school in the University of California System participating in NCAA Division III athletics.
UC Santa Cruz has gained a measure of notoriety due to their unusual nickname: The Banana Slugs.
After 15 years of offering students wide-ranging club and intramural sports competition, UC Santa Cruz began participating in five NCAA Division III sports 1980.
As a tongue-in-cheek response to the often ferocious competitive environment associated with intercollegiate athletics, UC Santa Cruz students adopted the loathsome banana slug as their unofficial mascot for many years before the school joined the NCAA. But membership in the NCAA required the school to have an official team name and university administrators decided the banana slug was not a suitable name for teams engaged in serious competition, and settled on a new name: Sea Lions.
But the new name was not popular with the student body. For five years they continued to cheer their beloved "Slugs." In 1986, after a campus-wide poll overwhelmingly supported changing the name, university administrators relented and dropped the Sea Lion name. UC Santa Cruz officially became the "Banana Slugs."
The UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs are a member of the Association of Division III Independents, fielding teams in five men's and seven women's sports. Men compete in tennis, swimming, soccer, volleyball and basketball. Women also compete in those five sports, along with golf and cross-country.
The Banana Slugs are an elite Division III men's tennis program, boasting 13 National Championship Tournament Finals appearances and 7 National Championships. They last won the championship in 2009.
The tennis team has been known to wear shirts with the phrase "Banana Slugs - No Known Predators" emblazoned across their backs.
UC Santa Cruz carries the Banana Slug name with pride. The mascot, Sammy the Slug, appears at sports events and other campus functions. In an intercollegiate sports world dominated by tigers, wolverines, bears, warriors, gators and wildcats, the Banana Slugs have been picked as one of the best team names by national media outlets such as Sports Illustrated, ESPN and Reader's Digest.
There are other imaginative team names on the college sports landscape, including the Long Beach State baseball team, affectionately known as the Dirtbags, the Akron Zips and TCU Horned Frogs, but none elicit a smiling "are you kidding me?" reaction more often than the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs.