Old Dominion in November: Monarch Basketball Tips Off and a Campus Runs at Full Stride
ODU is Norfolk's university — 24,000 students, a football bowl season in the balance, and basketball season opening at Chartway Arena. The Monarchs' November, on the court and across the campus.
Old Dominion University began in 1930 as the Norfolk Division of William & Mary, and it has grown into its own city within the city: some 24,000 students on a Hampton Boulevard campus that anchors Norfolk's midtown, with strengths in engineering, oceanography, business and health sciences that tie directly to the region's maritime economy.
November is the athletic year's hinge. Monarch football is deep in its Sun Belt Conference schedule, with bowl eligibility the annual arithmetic of its final month. And basketball — the sport that built ODU's national name, with a women's program of genuine championship pedigree and a men's program with deep NCAA Tournament history — tips off its season at Chartway Arena, the 8,600-seat home whose student section, the Monarch Maniacs, sets the building's volume.
The campus beyond the arenas is Norfolk's year-round engine: its students staff the region's internships, its research centers work on the coast's defining problems — flooding, ports, sea level — and its arts and lecture calendar fills the city's mid-winter evenings. University Village's restaurants and the campus's own expansions keep redrawing the Hampton Boulevard corridor between downtown and the naval station.
For Norfolk, ODU is the hometown team in the fullest sense: its alumni run the city's schools, yards, hospitals and businesses, and its game nights are when the whole city wears blue. The season is young, the arena is loud, and November — midterms, tip-offs and all — is when the university most feels like the center of its city. Because it is.
