48 Fun Facts About UNC

In which town is the University of North Carolina's flagship campus?

Chapel Hill. The name comes from New Hope Chapel, an abandoned Anglican chapel on the hilltop the trustees chose in 1792, and the town grew up around the campus.

Which future TV star graduated from UNC in 1949 with a music degree, having arrived planning to become a preacher?

Andy Griffith. The Mount Airy native swapped the pulpit for music, then taught high school until his comic monologue 'What It Was, Was Football' became a hit record.

What kind of animal is Rameses, UNC's live mascot?

A Dorset ram. Head cheerleader Vic Huggins bought the first one for $25 in 1924 in honour of fullback Jack 'The Battering Ram' Merritt, and the horns are painted Carolina blue for games.

Which future president taught fitness at the Navy pre-flight school on UNC's campus during World War II?

Gerald Ford. After a year as an instructor at the school he went to sea on the carrier USS Monterey, which a 1944 typhoon damaged so badly it was taken out of service.

Which two colours are UNC's school colours?

Light blue and white. They were the ribbon colours of the two campus debating societies, light blue for the Dialectic and white for the Philanthropic, and the football team took up both in the 1880s.

Which campus landmark is the best-known symbol of UNC?

The Old Well. A university president who found the old wooden well cover shabby had it rebuilt in 1897 on the model of the Temple of Love at Versailles.

Which is the oldest building on UNC's campus, built from 1793 to 1795?

Old East. It was the first building put up on any state university campus; the trustees designed it themselves and kept it plain to save money, and students still live in it.

Which US president, a UNC alumnus, is the campus's second quad named after?

James K. Polk had no formal schooling until his late teens, yet he entered UNC as a sophomore in 1816 and graduated with honours just two years later.

Which street, lined with shops and bars, do fans rush after big Tar Heel wins?

Franklin. Its Halloween street party grew so big, some 80,000 people in 2007, that the town launched a 'Homegrown Halloween' campaign to keep out-of-towners away.

In the 1960s the planetarium on UNC's campus trained which group to navigate by the stars?

NASA astronauts. Nearly every astronaut from Mercury to Apollo-Soyuz practised there, Neil Armstrong among them, in capsule mock-ups the staff built from plywood and barber's chairs.

UNC is a charter member of which athletic conference, formed in 1953?

Atlantic Coast Conference. UNC and six other schools walked out of the Southern Conference at its 1953 spring meeting and set up the new league themselves.

Which two universities form the other corners of the Research Triangle with UNC?

NC State and Duke. Research Triangle Park was laid out between the three campuses in 1959 to pull North Carolina's economy away from textiles, tobacco and furniture.

Which UNC programme, begun in 1951, was the first non-athletic merit scholarship in the United States?

Morehead-Cain. John Motley Morehead III funded it from a family fortune made in acetylene and Union Carbide, the same money that gave the campus its planetarium and bell tower.

What is the title of UNC's alma mater?

Hark the Sound. Its 1897 words were updated in 2006, when 'the sons true hearted' became 'our sons and daughters', and crowds still finish it with the 'I'm a Tar Heel born' chant.

Which novelist, a UNC student during World War I, edited the student newspaper The Tar Heel before finding fame in 1929?

Thomas Wolfe. He graduated in 1920 and put the place into Look Homeward, Angel, where his hero goes to college at a thinly disguised 'Pulpit Hill'.

Which Confederate monument was toppled by protesters on UNC's campus in August 2018?

Silent Sam. The bronze soldier holds a rifle but wears no cartridge box, so he could never have fired it, which is said to be how the 1913 statue later got its nickname.

Which sport had brought UNC the most NCAA team titles, 22 of them, by the end of 2024?

Women's soccer. The 22nd title came in 2024 under an interim coach, promoted when the man who had built the program retired four days before the season began.

Which coach led the Tar Heels' most decorated program from 1979 to 2024, winning 22 national titles?

Anson Dorrance. He was a law student when UNC talked him into coaching, and for ten seasons he ran the university's men's and women's teams side by side.

Which UNC forward won four NCAA titles between 1989 and 1993 and scored 158 goals for the United States?

Mia Hamm. Midway through her UNC career she helped the United States win the 1991 World Cup, and she added Olympic gold in 1996 and 2004.

Which former UNC field hockey star became the team's head coach in 2023 at the age of 22?

Erin Matson. Hired a month after graduating, she took over from her own coach, inherited a squad full of old teammates, and won the national title in her first season.

Which UNC linebacker went second overall in the 1981 NFL Draft and later became the league's Most Valuable Player?

Lawrence Taylor. With the New York Giants his attacking style turned the outside linebacker from a read-and-react defender into a pass rusher, and offences had to change how they blocked.

Which coach led the Tar Heels to their perfect 32-0 season and first NCAA title in 1957?

Frank McGuire. A New Yorker, he built the team almost entirely from players recruited back home, and more than ten thousand fans met them at the airport after the title.

UNC won the 1957 NCAA final in triple overtime against which future NBA great, the tournament's Most Outstanding Player?

Wilt Chamberlain. The one-point defeat as a sophomore dogged him, and a year later he gave up his final college season to tour with the Harlem Globetrotters.

Which UNC coach won 879 games over 36 years and two national titles?

Dean Smith. He made the 'four corners' famous, a keep-away offence so hard to break that it helped bring the shot clock into college basketball.

Which freshman's jump shot in the final seconds beat Georgetown for UNC's 1982 national title?

Michael Jordan. Georgetown still had time to answer, but Fred Brown mistakenly passed the ball straight to UNC's James Worthy, and the title was safe.

Whom did UNC beat for the 1993 national championship?

Michigan. Trailing by two with seconds left, Chris Webber signalled for a timeout his team did not have, and the technical foul handed UNC the title.

Which coach came home in 2003 after 15 seasons elsewhere and won three national titles at UNC?

Roy Williams. He had turned the same job down in 2000, and said three years later that it was too hard to say no to his old boss a second time.

Whom did the Tar Heels beat 75-70 for the 2005 national title?

Illinois. The Illini arrived 37-1 and one win from the record for victories in a season, and Sean May's 26 points denied them.

Which player broke Phil Ford's UNC career scoring record in December 2008?

Tyler Hansbrough. Nicknamed 'Psycho T' for his relentless style, he left as the ACC's all-time leading scorer and won a national title in his final college game.

Which team beat UNC on a buzzer-beater in the 2016 national final, despite Marcus Paige's tying three?

Villanova. Paige's off-balance three tied it with 4.7 seconds left, only for Kris Jenkins to answer with a three of his own as the horn sounded.

Whom did UNC beat 71-65 for the 2017 championship?

Gonzaga. The Bulldogs were playing in their first national final, while UNC was back a year after losing the title game on a shot at the buzzer.

Which player's 0.3-second jumper beat Kentucky in the 2017 Elite Eight?

Luke Maye. He was a reserve averaging 5.5 points a game, yet he scored 17 that day and was named the regional's Most Outstanding Player.

Who took over as UNC men's basketball head coach in April 2021?

Hubert Davis. The nephew of Tar Heel great Walter Davis, he was promoted after nine years as an assistant and took an eighth-seeded team to the Final Four in his first season.

Who was UNC's first African American scholarship basketball player, recruited in the 1960s?

Charlie Scott. He had first committed to Davidson before UNC's coach talked him round, and he won Olympic gold in 1968 while still a student.

Which singer-songwriter grew up beside UNC, where his father went on to run the medical school?

James Taylor. He began 'Carolina in My Mind' while homesick in London, recording for the Beatles' Apple label, and Paul McCartney played bass on it.

Which university is UNC's opponent in the 'South's Oldest Rivalry'?

Virginia. The two first met in 1892, and UNC chose the 1927 game against the Cavaliers, played on Thanksgiving Day, to dedicate Kenan Stadium, winning 14-13.

UNC's 81-77 win in the 2022 Final Four was the last game in the career of which rival coach?

Mike Krzyzewski. UNC had already beaten him 94-81 in his final home game four weeks earlier, so the Tar Heels spoiled his farewell twice.

Which former Tar Heel won the NBA Slam Dunk Contest in 2000 as a Toronto Raptor?

Vince Carter. Months later at the Sydney Olympics he leapt clean over France's 7-foot-2 centre Frédéric Weis for a dunk on the way to a gold medal.

Why could the NCAA not punish UNC in 2017 over its years of no-show 'paper classes'?

Any student could take them. The NCAA's panel said the courses were open to the whole student body, not just athletes, and cited only two former staff for refusing to cooperate.

Which school, coached by a former UNC assistant, beat Carolina 79-73 in the 1991 national semifinal?

Kansas. The Jayhawks' coach had spent ten seasons on UNC's bench, and the game ended with his former boss ejected for stepping out of the coaching box.

Which UNC building, a Greek temple designed by Alexander Jackson Davis, is a National Historic Landmark?

Playmakers Theatre. It was built as a library and ballroom and only became a theatre in the 1920s, and its column capitals carry ears of corn in place of the classical acanthus leaves.

During which period did UNC close its doors entirely?

Reconstruction, 1870-1875. UNC had stayed open right through the Civil War, but with money gone and politics turned against it afterwards, it shut for nearly five years.

Who ordered UNC to enrol its first Black undergraduates in 1955?

A federal court. UNC had turned down Leroy and Ralph Frasier and John Lewis Brandon even after the Supreme Court's Brown ruling, and it took the judges' order that September to get them in.

North Carolina's 1963 Speaker Ban barred state campuses from hosting speakers who belonged to which party?

The Communist Party. In 1966 a banned speaker got round the law by addressing more than a thousand UNC students from the public sidewalk across the campus wall, and judges struck it down two years later.

Which opponent did UNC beat aboard the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson to open the 2011-12 season?

Michigan State. The Veterans Day game was played on the flight deck with President Obama in the crowd, and it stopped in the first half while the crew lowered the colours at sunset.

What was the nickname of UNC's notoriously cold basketball arena of the 1920s and 1930s?

The Tin Can. The all-steel shed opened with no heating at all, and water running down its walls froze into icicles; the team finally moved out in 1938.

Nat Cartmell, UNC's first basketball coach, was an Olympic gold medallist in which sport?

Track and field. A sprinter with four Olympic medals, he had been hired to coach UNC's runners and simply took on the brand-new basketball team as well.

UNC's unbeaten 1924 team was named champion only later, because which event began in 1939?

The NCAA tournament. With no playoff to settle things, the Helms Foundation went back in 1943 and picked champions for earlier seasons, choosing UNC's 26-0 team for 1924.