Virginia Cavaliers - Origins and History

Origins and History

The school colors, adopted in 1888, are orange and navy blue. The athletic teams had previously worn grey and cardinal red as a tribute to Confederate grey uniforms stained with Southern blood, but those colors did not show up very well on dirty football fields as the school was sporting its first team. A mass meeting of the student body was called, and a star player showed up wearing a navy blue and orange scarf he had brought back from a University of Oxford summer rowing expedition. The colors were chosen when another student pulled the scarf from the player's neck, waved it to the crowd and yelled: "How will this do?" (Exactly 100 years later in 1988, Oxford named their own American football club the "Cavaliers," and soon after the Virginia team adopted its "curved sabres" logo in 1994, the Oxford team followed suit.)

The Cavalier mascot is a historical reference to the time when the Commonwealth of Virginia earned its nickname, the "Old Dominion." The Commonwealth was a hotbed of persons loyal to the English crown, called cavaliers in the days of the English Civil War and Interregnum.

When boxing was a major collegiate sport, Virginia's teams boxed in Memorial Gymnasium and went undefeated on a six-year run between 1932 and 1937, winning an unofficial national championship in 1938.

Virginia's athletic teams have participated in the Atlantic Coast Conference since the league's first year in 1953. Its men's basketball team has five times been part of the NCAA Elite Eight (1981, 1983, 1984, 1989, 1995), twice advancing to the Final Four (1981 and 1984). The football team has twice been honored as ACC Co-Champions (1989 with Duke, and 1995 with FSU). Women's cross country won national titles in 1981 and 1982. The soccer and lacrosse programs have both been tremendously successful. The men's soccer team has won six national championships, four consecutively (1989, 1991–1994, 2009). The men's lacrosse team has won seven national titles (1952, 1970, 1972, 1999, 2003, 2006, 2011), while the women have claimed three (1991, 1993, 2004).