Spartan Alert

UNC Greensboro

UNCG Recognized as Top 10 Military Friendly School

Posted on March 26, 2026

Chris Gregory, UNC Greensboro’s director of Military Affiliated Services, has been with the University for more than 20 years and has helmed the office since 2022. But when his department is recognized for excellence, as it was once again this year by MilitaryFriendly.com, he’s quick to credit our military-affiliated students — veterans, active-duty service members, and military family members.

“I think the Top 10 recognition really belongs to our students,” he says. “Their success stories are the real measure of the excellence we’re trying to achieve on campus. So anytime we get one of these accolades, it’s great for us, but I also think it just reflects how successful our students are.”

For the fourth year running, UNCG was named among the Top 10 schools nationwide for military friendliness and ranked No. 1 in North Carolina. The outlet also designated UNCG as a Military Spouse Friendly School for its accommodations and services to military families.

These are two of six military accolades the University has been granted during the 2025-26 academic year. US News & World Report recognized UNCG in its Best Colleges for Veterans category, as well as Best Online Bachelor’s Degree for Veterans and Best Online Master’s Degree in Education for Veterans. Military Times ranked UNCG at No. 3 in NC as Best for Veterans.

Chris Gregory, director of UNCG’s Military Affiliated Services

A Place for Veterans and Their Families

More than 10 percent of UNCG’s student body has a military affiliation. During the Spring 2026 semester, 501 of more than 17,000 students are veterans. Another 87 of them are on active duty in the National Guard or Reserves. And 1,244 of them are part of military families.

UNCG has several programs that cater to members of the military and their families, all channeled through Gregory’s department. Military-affiliated students get prioritized class registration. The Veterans Access Program in the School of Nursing grants students with military medical specialties an accelerated path to a B.S. in nursing.

Gregory and his staff help with federal tuition assistance through the GI Bill and other programs, scholarships, health services and counseling, career development, recreation, accessibility resources, civic engagement, and even housing. Any veteran who chooses to live on campus qualifies for the upper-class residence halls regardless of their year.

Additionally, UNCG’s Division of Student Affairs established a faculty fellow position in 2024 — the first of its kind in the UNC system — focused on expanding support provided to student veterans

“Chris and I recognized a need for more meaningful faculty connections with student veterans,” says Dr. Erin Reifsteck, UNCG’s Faculty Fellow for Student Veteran Well-Being. “The faculty fellow role was envisioned to not only advocate for student veterans through tailored research and programming, but also to serve as a bridge with other faculty who want to be more inclusive and supportive of student veterans in their teaching and mentoring.”

Military veteran students setting up a flag display to recognize our military community

Military Life vs College Life

There’s a social aspect to military affiliation as well.

“I think any time you have a group with the same kind of lived experiences, that helps bring a commonality to that community,” Gregory says. “For dependents, if you grow up moving every couple of years, you get pretty good at navigating new spaces and learning new things, making new friends quickly. And obviously, that can be a real benefit in college. For our military students who have served or are serving, there will be many shared experiences. They may have been in the same branch, served in the same area or the same country of the world, or the same base. Whatever the case may be, those experiences give them a different understanding of life and of each other.”

The Veteran’s Resource Center in Gregory’s office acts as a physical space where students with military affiliations can gather, swap stories, share information, and otherwise build community.

“There’s always coffee on the kettle, to speak. We really want it to be a place where folks can come and interact,” he says. “Military students can print documents for free. My favorite conversations are when the older students who have been here a year or more help the newer students transition to university life.”

Gregory’s office organizes social events like the annual cookout at Piney Lake, works with academic programs to help faculty understand the nuances of military-affiliated students, and coordinates with other student groups, such as the UNO Club, all of which help establish a sense of community.

When David Miller was medically retired from the Marine Corps, he lost a core part of his identity. As a psychology major at UNCG, he found a new way to serve, delving into research on veteran mental health.

‘A University commitment’

“Maybe our office leads the way,” Gregory says, “but it is definitely a University-wide commitment to make us a welcoming place for military-affiliated students.”

He is proud of the accolades UNCG has gathered during his time here and recognizes their impact in exposing this population to the school.

“The awards definitely help people looking to transition out of the military to find us,” he says. “Any time we get one of these accolades, it’s great for us. But really, it reflects just how successful our students are. These rankings are largely based on graduation and retention rates, as well as other student performance metrics. So I think they are a reflection of our wonderful students.”

Story by Brian Clarey, University Communications
Photos by Sean Norona, University Communications

Group of Marine Corp members sit together

You served. Now it’s our turn.

Visit the Office of Military Affiliated Services

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UNC Greensboro

The Early History of Women’s Athletics At the G, 1892-1950

Posted on March 24, 2026

The WC Years: Woolen togs, a forgotten field, and an attic gymnasium

In the upper reaches of the Julius I. Foust Building, the oldest structure on the campus of UNC Greensboro, sits a dusty, wood-paneled room that has been largely undisturbed for decades. It’s accessible only by a wall ladder hidden behind a closet door in the Global Engagement Office. You have to know where to look.

“I don’t know the last time anyone was up here besides us maintenance folks,” says Zach Hyatt of the UNCG Facilities crew, who, among his other duties, helps maintain this neo-Romanesque link to University history.

Foust’s Attic Portal to Early Spartan Athletics

Foust was built in 1891 and opened the next year. In 1892, the University’s inaugural year, Foust, along with the McIver House, Brick Dormitory, and Wooden Dormitory comprised the entirety of the State Normal and Industrial School, as UNCG was first known. Between 1892 and 1900, when Foust was still known simply as the Main Building, and at the behest of the campus’ resident physician Dr. Miriam Bitting, a gymnasium was created on the top floor in a space that looked very much like this one.

University Archivist and Engagement Coordinator Erin Lawrimore has chronicled UNCG’s legacy of women’s athletics in PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, and the Spartan Stories blog. She pored over old photos and documents to piece this history together.

The gymnasium, according to her work, “A History of Physical Education and Sport at UNCG,” had “11 [exercise] bars, chest weights, Indian clubs, and a weighing machine.”

“It was open only about four months of the year,” Lawrimore says, “because, you know, it’s the attic of Foust Building and there was no air conditioning.”

The original site of the gymnasium, according to Hyatt, has been rendered inaccessible after more than a century of structural upgrades and reconfigurations to the building.

Other athletic facilities would follow during the first half of the 20^th century, including a new gym established in 1907 in South Spencer, and an outdoor gym — “essentially a wooden floor about the size of a basketball court with a roof and flaps to keep out the rain,” according to Lawrimore’s history — built in 1922.

The first campus gymnasium located in the attic of what is now Foust Building from 1982-1900.

UNCG’s First Ladies of Sport

Physical activity has been part of UNCG’s DNA since the beginning, due largely to the presence of Dr. Miriam Bitting, the school’s first campus physician and one of the original faculty members who started the Department of Physiology and Physical Culture. Her successor Dr. Anna Gove, for which the student health center is now named, came on in 1893.

From Lawrimore’s history: “As the campus’s resident physician, Dr. Mariam Bitting not only taught physiology in the classrooms, but on her morning and evening rounds, she made suggestions about ventilation, clothing, bathing, dressing, and other points of personal hygiene.”

By 1893, when Bitting left the University to get married, Gove assumed her role. In those days, having a campus physician was a rare thing. Bitting was just the second woman physician in North Carolina; Gove was the third.

“At that time, it was pretty darn radical,” Lawrimore says. “The women who were the campus physicians were the ones who handled what we would now call public health on campus. And they were women, which was radical because there just weren’t that many women doctors. But they also were radical in that they were advocating physical activity and saying things that we now roll our eyes and laugh about, like pointing out that maybe if you corset yourself up so tight that you can’t breathe, that’s a bad thing. Maybe you shouldn’t do that.”

The first gym suit, used in the early part of the 20th century, had a Victorian sensibility.

To participate in physical culture, as it was then known, students wore the University’s very first “gym suit,” a garment of black wool comprised of a long-sleeved blouse with a puritan collar and a bow, paired with calf-length bloomers.

“We have a couple of those in our collection,” Lawrimore says. “We have full sets of the gym suits as they evolved over time.”

It was the Class of 1900 that, upon their graduation, convinced Charles McIver, the University’s founding president, to establish a campus Athletic Association and athletic grounds. That same year it was formally established — 15 years before the school had a student government. By 1902, its motto was “Athletics and active college work go hand in hand.”

Early Fields of Fitness

An open space on campus where the Petty Science Building now stands was designated as the school’s first athletic field. There, students could play tennis, field hockey, basketball, and other sports — strictly for recreation and fitness, Lawrimore says, as opposed to competition.

“It was not seen as proper for the women to necessarily be participating in these things for competitive reasons,” Lawrimore says. “Most of the competitions were either between the classes, so the juniors versus the seniors, or between the literary societies.”

By 1909, Bertha Bell had been named director of Physical Culture. She introduced a field day that year that allowed for every student and faculty member to participate. From Lawrimore’s History: “The final games in the basketball, tennis, and baseball tournaments were played; and individual track and field events, running, broad jump, 100‐yard dash, high jump, ball throwing, and relay races, were also part of the activities. A trophy was awarded to the winning class.”

The first Athletic Field, on the site where Petty Science Building now stands.

At the beginning of her tenure, Gove instituted a physical culture course as a requirement for all students, with a curriculum that included gymnastics, calisthenics, and other exercises. In those early days, the campus recognized a daily “Walking Period.”

At 4:30 p.m. each day, Lawrimore says, “they would ring the campus bell, and you had to open up your dorm room window and do something for the next hour, some sort of physical activity.”

“Now, for some of the students,” Lawrimore explains, “that meant you were going to play field hockey or basketball. And for others, it meant that’s when you’re going to go for a mandatory stroll through the woods, in your Victorian dress. And some of the students loved it, and some of the students hated it. If we tried to do that now, it would probably be the same way.”

Most students, she says, chose to spend that time walking through Peabody Park, which was established in 1895.

Hoops and Greens: The Emergence of Teams and Sports

The very first athletic “team” on this campus was known as the Naughty Naughts, the Class of 1900 basketball squad. The group, comprised of 16 women, wore uniforms of long, black skirts and collared black blouses with long, puffed sleeves, each bearing entwined double-zero numbers.

The rules for women’s basketball were very different from those for men, Lawrimore says.

The Class of 1900 basketball team, the Naughty Naughts

From her history: “In 1892, Senda Berenson introduced basketball for women at Smith College. The game featured modified rules, as it was feared that the women could (or should) not physically or mentally handle the strain of the men’s rules. The court was divided into three areas with three players from each team in each area (nine total players per team). The ball moved from section to section by passing or dribbling. Players were limited to three dribbles and could hold the ball for three seconds. No snatching or batting the ball away from a player was allowed.”

“It was like if you took basketball and mushed it with soccer,” she says now. “By the time UNCG began admitting men in 1963, we were playing basketball closer to the way it looks today. But those women’s rules really lasted. Oklahoma still had high schools that played that way in the 1990s.”

Golf has been a part of the University since 1929, when a single, par-3 hole was built on the west side of Rosenthal Gymnasium, now the Coleman Building. By 1935, the “Little Golf Course,” as it was known, was open for play and a Woman’s College Golf Club formed to maintain the course.

But within two years, Dean of Administration Walter Clinton Jackson said of the golf course in a memo: “[F]or two years and more, the whole matter was a source of unending difficulties, annoyance and trouble. Neither the faculty nor the students would support the club.”

In 1940, the course was reduced to just three holes, then allowed to overgrow during World War II. The subject would not be visited again until 1954, when plans for a new course took shape. It wouldn’t be ready for use until 1957. A vestige of that second course still exists on West Market Street today.

One Era Ends, Another Begins

The Woman’s College era officially ended when men were introduced to campus in 1963, and the legacy of sport both expanded and amplified. Teams were formed, an athletic department grew, and UNCG eventually worked its way to Division I in the NCAA, with dozens of championships and star athletes paving the way.

But it all began before the turn of the last century in an attic gymnasium where women in black wool sweated through their workouts.

Story by Brian Clarey, University Communications
Photos courtesy UNCG Special Collections and University Archives