RPI Engineers
sports teams of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
The RPI Engineers are composed of 21 teams representing Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in intercollegiate athletics, including men and women's basketball, cross country, ice hockey, lacrosse, soccer, swimming & diving, tennis, and track and field. Men's sports include baseball, football, and golf. Women's sports include field hockey, and softball. The Engineers compete in the NCAA Division III and are members of the Liberty League for all sports except ice hockey, which competes in NCAA Division I, as a member of ECAC Hockey.
History
The school's teams were originally nicknamed the "Fighting Engineers" in 1925, likely by a student writing for the paper, and called so due to the energy of the players. In 1995, the nickname of some of the school's teams was officially changed from the Engineers to the Red Hawks; however, the hockey, football, cross-country, tennis and track and field teams all chose to retain the Engineers name. The Red Hawks name was never much liked by the student body; a Red Hawk mascot was frequently taunted by fans who threw objects at him and chanted, "kill the chicken!". Finally, in 2009 the nickname was changed back to Engineers. In contrast, the official ice hockey mascot, Puckman (an anthropomorphic hockey puck with an engineer's helmet) has always been very popular.
During the 1970s and 1980s, one RPI cheer was:
E to the x, dy/dx, E to the x, dx
Cosine, secant, tangent, sine
3.14159
Square root, cube root, log of pi
Disintegrate them, RPI!
The public source identifies “RPI Engineers” as sports teams of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Engineers, sports and teams.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17190335. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1925, 1995 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “RPI Engineers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.