Belmont Bruins

The Belmont Bruins are the intercollegiate athletic teams of Belmont University located in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. The Bruins athletic program is a member of the Ohio Valley Conference (OVC) and competes at the NCAA Division I level.

The program's mascot is Bruiser the Bruin, and the school colors are navy blue and red. The Belmont teams had been known as the Rebels until 1995, when the name was changed for reasons of political correctness.

Teams

A member of the Ohio Valley Conference, Belmont University sponsors teams in eight men's and nine women's NCAA sanctioned sports:

Basketball

The school has a heated basketball rivalry with Lipscomb University, a similarly-sized private institution in Nashville. For much of both schools' athletic histories, Belmont and Lipscomb played one another at least twice per year on a home-and-home basis (even more frequently in some years) in both men's and women's basketball. These games are nicknamed the "Battle of the Boulevard", alluding to the road connecting the two schools. In 2006, with both teams battling for their first-ever NCAA Tournament berths, Belmont defeated Lipscomb in overtime to win the Atlantic Sun championship 74–69. The Belmont Bruins were seeded 15th in the 2006 NCAA Tournament, losing in the first round to the UCLA Bruins. Even though the two schools are no longer in the same conference following Belmont's 2012 move to the OVC, the games are still played twice a year for both men and women. (The only other non-conference basketball rivalry in Division I with two games each season is New Mexico–New Mexico State.)