Virginia Cavaliers

The Virginia Cavaliers, also known as Wahoos or Hoos, are the athletic teams representing the University of Virginia, located in Charlottesville. The Cavaliers compete at the NCAA Division I level (FBS for football), in the Atlantic Coast Conference since 1953. Known simply as Virginia or UVA in sports media, the athletics program has twice won the Capital One Cup for men's sports (in 2015 and 2019) after leading the nation in overall athletic excellence in those years. The Cavaliers have regularly placed among the nation's Top 5 athletics programs.

Virginia leads the ACC with 23 NCAA Championships in men's sports. The program has added 12 NCAA titles in women's sports for a grand total of 35 NCAA titles, second overall in this major conference of fifteen programs. In "revenue sports", Virginia men's basketball won the NCAA tournament championship in 2019, won ACC tournaments in 1976, in 2014 and in 2018, and have finished first in the ACC standings 11 times. College Football Hall of Fame coach George Welsh retired with the most wins in ACC history (as of 2025, he places second) after leading Virginia football for nineteen years.

Other prominent NCAA Championship winning programs include Virginia men's lacrosse (9 national titles including 7 NCAA Championships), Virginia men's soccer (7 NCAA Championships), Virginia men's tennis (159–0 ACC win streak from 2006 to 2016; 2013, 2022, 2023, and "three-peat" 2015–2017 NCAA Championships), and Virginia baseball (winners of the 2015 College World Series). Virginia women's rowing has added two recent NCAA Championships (2010 and 2012) while Virginia women's lacrosse won NCAA Championships in 1991, 1993, and 2004. Women's cross country won repeat NCAA Championships in 1981 and 1982. Virginia men's lacrosse repeated in 2019 and 2021 (the 2020 session being cancelled due to COVID) and Virginia women's swimming and diving won the Cavaliers' most recent NCAA championships with a 2021–2025 "five-peat". Non-NCAA national championships include six national titles in indoor men's tennis, two USILA titles in men's lacrosse, and one AIAW title in women's indoor track and field. UVA men's boxing was a leading collegiate program when boxing was a major national sport in the first half of the 20th century, completing four consecutive undefeated seasons between 1932 and 1936, and winning an NCAA Championship in 1938.

The Cavalier mascot represents a mounted swordsman, and there are crossed swords or sabres in the official logo. Another moniker, the "Wahoos", or "Hoos" for short, based on the university's rallying cry "Wah-hoo-wah!" is also commonly used. Though originally only used by the student body, both terms—“Wahoos” and “Hoos”—have come into widespread usage with the local media as well.

The school colors, adopted in 1888, are orange and navy blue. The athletic teams had previously worn grey and cardinal red 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 team's name was selected in reference to the historical Virginia Cavaliers, Royalists of the English Civil War said to have fled to the Colony of Virginia for protection.

Pop Lannigan was one of the "most noted athletic trainers in the East" during his tenure at Virginia from 1900 until his death in 1930. He came to the University of Virginia after previously serving as a trainer at Cornell University for 14 years. During his early years at Virginia he founded the college basketball and college boxing programs, and in track and field trained the "Arkansas Flash" James Rector to within six inches of winning the 100 meter dash at the 1908 Olympics (with a time of 10.9 seconds) while still a UVA student. When boxing was a major collegiate sport, Virginia's teams boxed in Memorial Gymnasium and after Lannigan's sudden death managed to go undefeated for a six-year run between 1932 and 1937, winning the NCAA Championship in 1938.

On December 4, 1953, the University of Virginia joined the Atlantic Coast Conference as the league's eighth member. Its men's basketball team won its first NCAA Championship in 2019. The baseball team won the College World Series in 2015 and has appeared in the CWS five times (2009, 2011, 2014, 2015, 2021). The men's lacrosse team has won nine national titles (1952, 1970, 1972, 1999, 2003, 2006, 2011, 2019, 2021), while the women have claimed three (1991, 1993, 2004). The football team has twice been honored as ACC co-champions (1989 and 1995). The men's soccer team has won seven NCAA Championships, four consecutively (1989, 1991–1994, 2009, 2014). Women's swimming and diving won its first NCAA Championship in 2021 and repeated in 2022, 2023, and 2024. Women's cross country won national titles in 1981 and 1982. The men's tennis team won NCAA Championships in 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2022, and 2023.