The sports drink Gatorade’s name comes from the University of Florida Gators, because it was invented in 1965 for football players at the university. Assistant football coach Dwayne Douglas expressed concern to Dr. Robert Cade, a kidney disease specialist at the university, that football players were losing a large amount of water weight during games without urinating often. Cade determined that players were sweating out sodium and potassium, thus throwing off the body’s chemical balance. He developed a drink containing electrolytes to replace those lost during excessive sweating and added lemon to flavor it. Other universities became interested in the drink, and by 1983, it was distributed nationally under the Gatorade name.
More about Gatorade:
- Gatorade holds the record as the beverage company with the most discontinued flavors — 26 of them as of early 2014.
- The tradition of dumping a bucket of Gatorade over a coach’s head after winning a game began in 1984, when players from the National Football League's New York Giants doused their head coach, Bill Parcells, with Gatorade after a victory over the Washington Redskins.
- Royalties from the sales of Gatorade made the University of Florida an estimated $80 million US Dollars (USD) by early 2014.