On the banks of the Hudson River, overlooking mighty New York City, there sits a tiny engineering college called the Stevens Institute of Technology.
There is a legend passed down through generations at Stevens. It was a revolutionary, ambiguous time in America, sometime in the ’60s or ’70s, and the president of Stevens wanted to change the school’s image.
This president held a vote, but the students, desperate to keep their “Engineer” nickname, proposed mascots with names that were unprintable and certainly unusable. The president, sitting in his office and mulling over the situation, was desperate. He looked out his window onto the banks of the Hudson River.
And thus, the Stevens Ducks were born.
There is perhaps no better measure of the success of the Oregon program than the increased visibility for the Stevens Institute, a college in Hoboken, N.J., whose members chuckle at the notion of “The Year of the Duck.”

“Because of what (Oregon has) done on a national scale, it doesn’t make the Ducks sound so funny any more,” Stevens lacrosse coach Byron Collins said. “They used to just put ‘Stevens’ in the reports, now they say ‘the Ducks were led by…’ We thank (Oregon) for that.
“We’re riding on the coattails of Oregon.”
Collins has Mike Bellotti’s job at Stevens; he is coach of the premier sport on campus. The lacrosse Ducks do, after all, draw between 750-1,000 fans on good days. Many of those fans are professors.
“There is no football, lacrosse is it,” Collins said. “We have our homecoming during lacrosse season.”
Which is in the spring. In fact, the lacrosse Ducks recently went to the NCAA Tournament for the second year in a row. That’s the Division III NCAA Tournament, of course. With an enrollment of 1,600 and an average incoming GPA of 3.70, Stevens is far more selective about its students than its athletics.
“When our coaches recruit, they know they have to recruit athletes that can do the work here,” Stevens athletic director Russell Rogers. “We do compete (for students) with some of the top schools like MIT, Carnegie Mellon, NYU.”
Despite the gap in academics, Oregon and Stevens have eerie athletic parallels. The Ducks of the Hudson recently installed NextTurf onto the lacrosse field. The Ducks of the Willamette recently took it out of Autzen Stadium. Like the long-standing tradition of track in Eugene, in New Jersey they have a long-standing lacrosse tradition. Stevens, in fact, has the longest-running continuous lacrosse program in the country.
Led by that lacrosse team, Stevens is experiencing an athletics renaissance, similar to the recent Oregon resurgence. No Stevens team went to an NCAA Tournament before lacrosse did it last year. Then, this fall, the soccer team did it. The lacrosse team did it again. The baseball team joined the party.
“We’ve never been known for athletics up until recently,” Rogers said. “We’ve gotten additional dollars to do things like improving our facilities, and we’ve got a contract with Adidas sports now for all our uniforms and equipment needs.”
Ah, it’s an Adidas school. For shame. Thus begin the differences between Ducks East and Ducks West. For one, there’s the absence of tailgating and, well, any crowds whatsoever at Stevens. Then there’s the academics-oriented athletes. Stevens athletes have an average 3.1 GPA, which is markedly higher than Oregon’s athletic GPA.
But that’s OK by the Ducks at Stevens. They’re happy to have the jocks of Oregon, even if Oregon doesn’t appreciate the academic visibility that Stevens earns for Ducks around the country.
“They’re obviously two totally different schools in terms of scope and size and athletics programs and all that,” Rogers said. “But we do have at least one thing in common.”
We certainly do.
The Ducks.