Ashes: After Jumbo's stuffed hide burned in a 1975 Barnum Hall fire, his remains were recovered and stored in a peanut butter jar now kept in the office of Athletic Director Bill Gehling. Rubbing the jar before a big game supposedly brings good luck.
Brown and blue: Our school colors make for some of the most attractive — or ugly, depending on how you look at them — uniforms in the country.
Cousens Gym: The 78-year-old facility has charm, old-school appeal and — finally — a regulation-size court. Recent renovations lengthened the court to 94 feet, allowing Tufts' basketball team to host an NCAA tournament game last fall.
Director's Cup: Tufts scored its best-ever finish in the national aggregate sports rankings, a composite list of across-the-board athletic success for each Div. III school. The Jumbos finished sixth, buoyed by tallies from 12 different sports.
Ellis Oval: The site of the outdoor track and football field is named for Fred "Fish" Ellis (LA '29), a four-sport star considered one of the greatest male athletes in school history. Built in 1894, it is the oldest sports complex on campus.
Free: The price of every single sporting event for all Tufts students — substantially less than a front-row seat at Fenway Park or even a bleacher seat at Gillette Stadium.
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 pool of any school in Tufts' athletic conference, the facility is the home of Tufts' swimming and diving teams. In the past, the facility's poor air quality has been blamed for the rash of respiratory illnesses seen on the Jumbos' varsity squads.
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 contest, played with a round ball under rugby-style rules, as the birth of the sport at the college level.
JumboCast: The student-run webcasting group streams live coverage of a selection of 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, a school located in the Northeast has a giant elephant statue on campus, but not an ice hockey rink.
NESCAC: Boasting four of the Directors' Cup's top 10 schools, numerous defending national champions, and, of course, your Tufts Jumbos, the New England Small College Athletic Conference is perhaps the strongest conference in Div. III.
One: The number of NCAA national team titles won by Tufts, after the men's lacrosse team captured the school's first-ever championship this past spring. The NCAA does not sponsor sailing. (See "Sailing").
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, Mass., 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 onetime presidential hopeful pitched on Tufts' baseball team from 1968-1970 and ranks 15th on the program's career strikeouts list.
Sailing: Trinity has a stranglehold on squash and Williams is tops in just about everything else, but the Jumbos' fans can always hang their hats on the sailing team. The squad is easily the most decorated team on campus with 20 national titles since 1976.
Tuftonia's Day: Maybe it's not as catchy as the University of Michigan's "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, or why it gets its own day.
Ultimate frisbee: Thanks to Tufts' nationally competitive men's and women's Ultimate A teams, E-Men and Ewo, respectively, Ultimate is perhaps the University's most visible club sport.
Voute Courts: Home to the men's and women's tennis teams by day and health-conscious townies by night.
William "Bill" 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 soccer head coach for the first 20 years of its existence as a varsity program.
X's and O's: Tufts boasts one of the most decorated coaching staffs in all of Div. III, including women's basketball's Carla Berube, who played on the 1995 undefeated University of Connecticut squad, and baseball's John Casey, who won his 500th career game in the spring.
Yoga: As if to compound the whole latte-sipping, left-leaning, NPR-listening stereotype, Tufts students have taken a liking to yoga, which is among the most popular physical education courses on campus.
Zimman Field: The official name of the football field within the Ellis Oval, home to the Tufts football team and surrounded by the Ding Dussault Track, where the outdoor track and field teams hold their meets.
Editor's Note: This article contains information adapted from a similar feature in a Sept. 2, 2009 issue.
—by Phil Dear
