Full speed ahead: The nickname was first given to SMC players on the gridiron. And over the last century, the Saint Mary’s Gaels have built a reputation from the basketball court to the rugby pitch, from softball and baseball diamonds to soccer fields, to the pool and beyond. / Photo by Kyle Terada / West Coast Conference
100 Years of the Galloping Gaels: How Saint Mary’s Got Its Iconic Nickname
In October 1926, San Francisco sportswriter Pat Frayne gave SMC’s powerhouse football team a nickname that stuck. The mascot harkens back to the College’s Irish Catholic roots. It also reflects a long history of first-generation college students.
For a century now, the Saint Mary’s College Gaels have loomed large in collegiate athletics.
They have clinched national championships in Rugby and Women’s Soccer; Men’s Basketball has reached March Madness a dozen times since 2005. Last year, men’s hoops, Softball, and Baseball all played in NCAA tournaments. SMC has won a slew of West Coast Conference titles in Men’s and Women’s Basketball, Softball, Baseball, Volleyball, Women’s Tennis, and more. Former Gaels have played in the NBA, WNBA, MLB, Major League Soccer, Major League Rugby, and medaled and coached at the Olympics. They have played in pro leagues internationally, and the Australian Men’s Basketball Team is currently coached by a Gael.
Unquestionably, the Gaels are a known force. The image of the armored Gaelic warrior, astride a speeding steed, has become iconic. But why, exactly, are we Gaels?
The historic Gaels were an ethno-linguistic group that lived in Ireland for millennia, expanding to western Scotland and the Isle of Man around the 4th century. Today, Gaelic culture and language persist there, especially in Ireland. But how does all that relate to a liberal arts college in Moraga, California?
The simple answer: On October 11, 1926, Pat Frayne, a sportswriter for the San Francisco Call and Post, called SMC’s then-dominant football team “the Galloping Gaels,” and the nickname stuck. But that doesn’t quite convey how much of a powerhouse the football team once was—or the significance of the Irish Catholic connection.
“Notre Dame of the West”
When Archbishop Joseph Alemany established Saint Mary’s College in San Francisco in 1863, he defined its mission as serving “the children of Miners, Mechanics, and Agriculturists.” At the time, Alemany mainly meant Irish Catholic immigrants.
During the Gold Rush, scores of Irish immigrants arrived in San Francisco, fleeing famine and economic downturn and seeking their fortunes in the Sierra foothills. A few struck it rich. But thousands more found steady employment building the transcontinental railroad, staffing fire and police stations, and in time, filling civil service positions. By 1880, a third of San Francisco’s population was of Irish descent.
One of Archbishop Alemany’s primary goals in starting SMC was to “protect the faith of the sons of immigrant Roman Catholics in this frontier territory and help them rise in society,” Ronald Isetti told the NewsCenter in 2016. Isetti, who taught history for 27 years at SMC, also wrote a complete history of the College, On the Promising Shores of the Pacific.
“Saint Mary’s was a college primarily for Catholics, especially Irish Catholics, in the 19th century,” Isetti said.
That remained true in 1919, when Saint Mary’s—which had by then moved its campus across the bay to Oakland—hired a 25-year-old Irish Catholic high school coach from Portland, Oregon, to revive the struggling football team. Edward “Slip” Madigan was a former University of Notre Dame center and a protégé of legendary coach Knute Rockne. Madigan also coached basketball and baseball, but his football coaching helped establish Saint Mary’s as “the Notre Dame of the West.”
Under his leadership, the Saints—then the SMC mascot for football, basketball, and rugby—became nationally known for their fierce, flashy style of play. From 1924 to 1928, the team earned four consecutive conference championships. In non-conference matchups, they beat heavyweights like Stanford University and the University of Southern California. After beating Fordham University in New York in 1930, the team took a brief detour—to the White House, to be congratulated by then-President Herbert Hoover.
“We have a team out here called St. Mary’s…they haven’t lost a game since the gold rush,” the humorist Will Rogers once quipped.
"They represented a great American success story. That generation was joining the professional classes and transcending the social and economic limits of their time.”
—Randy Andrada ’73
“The Madigan Era,” as it became known, also overlapped with the very first AP College Football Poll, released on October 19, 1936. Voted No. 12 in the country: Saint Mary’s.
Madigan’s run lasted until his ouster as coach in 1940. But 1926 was still early days; that year’s roster included future Green Bay Packer Larry Bettencourt and future New York Giant Ike Frankian. It also “resembled a page from the Dublin phone directory,” as Randy Andrada ’73 joked in his history of Gael football, They Did It Everytime. (By that, Andrada naturally meant Ireland’s capital, not the nearby East Bay city.)
On October 9, 1926, Bettencourt, Frankian, and their SMC teammates faced the University of California, Berkeley, at Cal Memorial Stadium before a crowd of 67,000 people. Saint Mary’s scored two touchdowns early, but Cal narrowed the margin to 13-7 and looked poised to take control. But when SMC’s Boyd “Cowboy” Smith ran for an 80-yard touchdown through the mist, the tide turned. Saint Mary’s smothered the Golden Bears, 26–7.
Pat Frayne, the sportswriter at the San Francisco Call and Post, was an unabashed Saint Mary’s fan. “Frayne would come out to Oakland, and then Moraga, and interview Slip, and they’d have a few cocktails together,” Saint Mary’s Randy Andrada says. “He was an old-time Irish guy from San Francisco, who really liked the Catholic colleges as opposed to Cal or Stanford.”
Frayne’s lede on October 11 showed his allegiance. “The Lone Horseman and the Galloping Gaels trampled the Golden Bears last Saturday in a flurry of speed and strength,” he gushed.
Boyd Smith, the Horseman in question, didn’t retain that nickname; perhaps that was one too many for the Cowboy. But that phrase “Galloping Gaels” had staying power.
After an undefeated 1926 season, Madigan applied for copyright.
Transcending Limits
Gideon the Gael, the current mascot iteration, is more a grinner than a galloper. Still, the nickname lives on. In recent years, the student spirit group GaelForce has re-adopted the iconic 1970s-era Galloping Gael logo on merchandise and social media.
In 2026, Saint Mary’s football roster no longer resembles a Dublin, Ireland phone directory; indeed, there’s no football team, period. Like former conference rivals Santa Clara University and the University of San Francisco, SMC’s football program ended decades ago. These days, the Galloping Gaels can be found on the basketball court, the rugby pitch, the softball and baseball diamond, the soccer field—or, as of this academic year, the pool.
The Saint Mary’s community has diversified dramatically over the past century. For one thing, SMCs had exactly zero women enrolled in 1926; that changed in 1970, and as of fall 2026, more than half the student population is female. This fall’s incoming Gael class also includes 51 international students from 17 countries and six continents. For over a decade, the College has been a designated Hispanic Serving Institution, with more than a quarter of the student population identifying as Hispanic. SMC has also earned recognition as an Asian American Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution (AANAPISI).
That said, Randy Andrada believes the Gael mascot can and should resonate.
In the 1920s, many of the young men at Saint Mary’s were first-generation college students. The Galloping Gaels of 1926 were mostly the children of working-class immigrants.
“They represented a great American success story,” Andrada says. “That generation was joining the professional classes and transcending the social and economic limits of their time.”
That’s something that Gaels of any era can connect with, including Andrada. He and his brother, Joe Andrada ’67, both went to SMC, the first in their family to attend college. Randy Andrada soon earned a law degree from the UC Law San Francisco (formerly UC Hastings College of Law) and has managed his firm, Andrada & Associates, for decades.
Andrada also notes this: “People forget that, in the 1920s, there was still considerable prejudice in the country against Irish Catholics.” In Oakland, where Saint Mary’s was located from 1889 until 1928, the Ku Klux Klan had a strong presence and increasingly targeted Catholics. The 1927 game between “Protestant” Stanford and Saint Mary’s took on its own level of anti-Catholic tension—and satisfaction when the Gaels won, 16–0.
“50 Million Irishmen Can’t be Wrong,” crooned a San Francisco Call and Post cartoon after the victory, riffing on a popular song of the era.
While Andrada was still a student at SMC, then-President Brother Mel Anderson urged him to write a history of the football team. Andrada interviewed numerous former coaches, football players, and other figures. One was Pat Frayne, the journalist who coined the “Galloping Gael” nickname.
In 1973, the sportswriter was no longer the stylish cigar-chomper of his youth. “Bless his heart, but Frayne was sort of past his prime,” Andrada says. “He never really was able to tell me how the nickname popped into his head. Just call it divine inspiration.”
Sounds like God is a Gael after all.
Hayden Royster is the Associate Editor in the Office of Marketing and Communications at Saint Mary’s College. Write him.
