Union Garnet Chargers
sports program at Union College in Schenectady, New York
The Union Garnet Chargers comprise the 27 teams representing Union College in intercollegiate athletics, including men's and women's basketball, crew, cross country, ice hockey, lacrosse, soccer, swimming & diving, tennis, and track and field. Men's only sports include baseball and football. Women's only sports include field hockey, flag football, golf, softball, and volleyball.
Name
On October 13, 1933, the school newspaper Concordiensis dubbed the Union College football team the "Dutchmen" despite the College's athletic teams being named the "Garnet" the school's color which was adopted in 1866. The nickname was widely adopted by local sports journalists with the two names, Garnet and Dutchmen, being used interchangeably for decades before Dutchmen eventually won out. The college eventually conceded and used the name Dutchmen, and later Dutchwoman, despite the name never being endorsed nor officially adopted by the school in any capacity. On February 2, 2023, Union College's president David R. Harris announced that the school would explore choosing a new nickname and mascot noting that while the name "Dutchmen" was popular, that it does "little to connect the College to prospective students" and "puts the College at a distinct disadvantage from a marketing and branding standpoint" while also clarifying "we don't find anything offensive with a Dutchman/Dutchwoman name."
The school created a website where students could propose new nicknames, with over 2,200 different ideas being proposed, with the school only seriously considering 400 of them. This would eventually get narrowed down to 20, including retaining the "Dutchmen", before four finalists where selected: "Garnet Chargers", "Garnet Hawks", "Garnet Griffins", and "Garnet Storm." The school also stated that while it would have liked to just adopt the "Garnet" as their logo, that it was already trademarked by Swarthmore College. On August 3, 2023, the school formally announced that it had chosen the "Garnet Chargers" as their new nickname and mascot, with the name being a reference to "Schenectady’s legacy as a leader in electrical technologies."
Affiliation
The Garnet Chargers 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.
“Union Garnet Chargers” enters the record as sports program at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Union, Garnet and Chargers can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19544327. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1933, 1866 and 2023.
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