Will Driver, the creator of the “Roar Lions” hand sign for the University of North Alabama, is advocating for more students, faculty and staff to adopt the sign.
As the Spirit Activities Coordinator for the University Program Council, Driver has a focus on uplifting the spirit of those on campus, and creating a hand sign for UNA goes to further those efforts.
Driver came up with the idea for the hand sign while taking an American Sign Language class during his freshman year.
“I took Professor Reutter’s ASL class, and I was really into American Sign Language, because I feel like it makes you cultured as a person to know more than one language,” said Driver. “I was fooling around one day, and I signed an ‘R’ and an ‘L.’ Then I did it together, and I thought, ‘That means Roar Lions!’”
Driver’s discovery of the hand sign was exciting for him, as he felt that he had created something that was specific to UNA.
“We [didn’t] have a hand sign,” Driver said. “We can do claws, but that’s not a lion. That could be a bear. We need something unique to us.”
During the summer between his freshman and sophomore year, Driver began doing the sign at SOAR, teaching it to his fellow SOAR counselors and incoming freshmen as he went.
“A few people would do it, so I stuck with it all year,” Driver said. “Junior year SOAR is when it really started to catch on, not just with prospective or incoming students but more with students as a whole. SOAR counselors and people who were involved more started doing it, and I really appreciated that. I got associated with it, and it was awesome.”
As more students began learning about the hand sign, it took off, and many were curious about what it meant. Use of the hand sign was mostly limited to students until Disability Support Services adopted the sign. Members of DSS researched the sign, making sure it had no other connotations in ASL, before officially using the sign.
“Megan Simmons and Jeremy Martin in DSS really hopped on the train because it does have to do with disability, with those who are hard of hearing or deaf,” Driver said. “It was something they hopped onto because they said, ‘This is awesome, and this can represent us as well!’ It’s very inclusive, so they hopped on it, and they made a tee shirt with it.”
In early August, UNA put the hand sign on their official Instagram story as an answer to the question “Does UNA have a hand sign?” To Driver, this signified that his hand sign was gaining traction at UNA, and he was excited to see people doing the sign in their Lucky Dip pictures on the first day of classes this semester.
Though Driver is thrilled to have designed a hand sign for the university, he is also proud that he was able to create a symbol of the campus’s diversity.
“It’s the beauty of UNA, but as a whole, America and the entire world, the human race,” Driver said. “We are all so different. We all work together, and we all bring something to the table. We have differences, but we are all human beings, and that’s what I love. I kind of carried that on into the ‘Roar Lions’ sign, because we are all UNA students. It helps us to identify under a common bond, especially seeing other schools [with hand signs]. We have ‘Roar Lions,’ which I think is really special, because we all know what ‘Roar Lions’ means, and we all identify under that. Finding a common identity helps bring us together as human beings and as UNA students. That’s what I feel that it represents, and that’s why I feel that it’s good to have that. In a world that’s so divisive, it’s great to have something that can bring us together.”
Driver hopes to see his hand sign be recognized by UNA administration in the future, furthering the reach of the message his sign delivers.
