Tufts Sports | ABCs of Tufts Athletics

Ashes: After Jumbo the Elephant's stuffed hide burned in a 1975 fire, his remains were recovered and stored in a peanut butter jar that is kept in Athletic Director Bill Gehling's office. Rubbing the jar before a big game is said to bring good luck.
Brown and blue: Our school colors make for some of the ugliest uniforms this side of the Oregon Ducks.
Cousens Gym: The 77-year-old facility has charm, old-school appeal and — finally — a regulation-sized court. Recent renovations lengthened the court to 94 feet, allowing Tufts' basketball teams to host NCAA Tournament games as early as this season.
DMR: Following a photo-finish victory at last year's indoor track championships, the women's distance medley relay (DMR) team became Tufts' first repeat national champion since Caitlin Murphy (LA '00) won back-to-back 800-meter crowns from 1999-2000.
Ellis Oval: The site of the outdoor track and football field is named for Fred "Fish" Ellis (A '29), a four-sport star considered arguably the greatest male athlete in school history. Built in 1894, it is also the oldest sports complex on campus.
Field turf: Bello Field's unique playing surface has given Tufts quite a home-field advantage. Including the postseason, the field hockey team is 38-8 all-time at the five-year-old facility.
Gantcher Center: Completed in November 1999, the 66,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility houses an indoor track and tennis court.
Hamilton Pool: The oldest swimming pool in the NESCAC is the home of Tufts' swimming and diving teams. The facility's poor air quality was blamed for the rash of respiratory illnesses seen on the men's squad last year.
Intercollegiate football: Athletics Director Emeritus Rocky Carzo has long contended that Tufts and Harvard squared off in the first U.S. college football game in 1875. The history books, however, cite an 1869 Rutgers-Princeton game, played with a round ball under rugby-style rules, as the birth of intercollegiate football.
JumboCast: The student-run webcasting group streams live coverage of several Tufts sporting events over the Internet free of charge.
Kraft Field: The home of the men's and women's soccer team bears the name of Patriots owner Bob Kraft, who gave the field as a gift to Tufts in the 1980s.
Larry Bird: The Celtics great once filmed a commercial for the defense technologies company Raytheon in Cousens Gym.
Malden Forum: The hockey team's home is located roughly 15 minutes away in nearby Malden, Mass. That's right, we have a giant elephant statue on our campus, but not an ice hockey rink.
NESCAC: Boasting the Directors' Cup's top three schools, six defending national champions and, of course, your Tufts Jumbos, the NESCAC is perhaps the strongest conference in Div. III.
Objective Analysis of Baseball: An Ex-College course on sabermetrics for all the stats geeks out there.
President's Marathon Challenge: Started by University President Lawrence Bacow in 2003, the PMC's squad of 200 runners is the largest known collegiate marathon team in the country.
Quinsigamond: Located in Worcester, the lake hosts many of the men's and women's crew teams' regattas, including the New England Rowing Championships.
Richardson, Bill: The New Mexico governor and one-time presidential hopeful pitched on the baseball team from 1968-1970 and ranks 15th on the program's career strikeouts list.
Sailing: Trinity owns squash, Bowdoin had a stranglehold on field hockey in recent years and Williams is tops in just about everything else. But Jumbo fans can always hang their hats on the sailing team, easily the most decorated squad on campus, with 20 national titles since 1976.
Tuftonia's Day: Maybe it's not as catchy as "Hail to the Victors," but Tufts' fight song, penned in 1913, is just as timeless. We still don't know what a "tuftonia" is, however.
Ultimate frisbee: Thanks to the nationally-competitive E-Men and the Ewo, ultimate is perhaps the most visible club sport at Tufts.
Voute Courts: Home to the men's and women's tennis teams by day and health-conscious townies by night.
William Gehling: Tufts' Athletics Director since 1999. Gehling has spent a lifetime on the Jumbo sports scene, co-captaining the 1973 men's soccer team to a 10-2 mark before serving as the women's head coach for the first 20 years of its existence as a varsity program.
X's and O's: Of the 22 varsity head coaches on campus, seven are Tufts alums, including 26-year coaching veteran John Casey of the baseball team and Mike Daly, who, after playing football and baseball at Tufts, was hired to coach the men's lacrosse team in 1999.
Yoga: As if to compound the whole latte-sipping, left-leaning, NPR-listening stereotype, we at Tufts have taken a liking to yoga, among the most popular physical education courses on campus.
Zero: The number of NCAA team national championships Tufts has won in its history (the NCAA does not sponsor sailing). That's not to say we haven't come close. Both the women's soccer and field hockey teams have reached the NCAA title game in the last decade, only to lose in one-goal heartbreakers.