Athletics began officially at the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts on March 2, 1892, at what by 2006 was Raleigh's Pullen Park. On that day, a football team made up of students at the college defeated the Raleigh Male Academy, a local high school, by the score 12-6. That fall, the team scrimmaged for the first time against the second-string teams of area colleges. After losing badly to the University of North Carolina and Wake Forest, the football team decided that it lacked the funds necessary to compete on an equal level with other colleges and universities. Therefore, they petitioned the college Board of Trustees for fifty dollars to finance travel and team equipment. With this request, the faculty and trustees of the college first became involved with intercollegiate athletics. After the board made the decision to grant the team the requested funds in 1893, A&M College played its first formal (non-scrimmage) game that fall against the University of North Carolina's second-string team, to which it lost, 22-0.

Football remained the most popular sport at the college throughout its first decades. Its first on-campus game was played in 1907 at the athletic field that would become Riddick Stadium. That same year, A&M College won the Southern Intercollegiate Association championship, with six wins and one tie, and in 1918, football player John Ripple became the school's first All-American.

By the first decades of the twentieth century, other sports had been organized and began to gain in prominence as well. The baseball team, which had played its first official game in 1894 against Guilford College, won its first state championship also in 1907. Four years later, the school played its first official basketball games against Wake Forest, with A&M College's home game played in the Pullen Hall auditorium.

In 1921, North Carolina State College of Agriculture and Engineering became a charter member of the Southern Intercollegiate Conference, which also included Alabama, Alabama Polytechnic Institute (later Auburn), Clemson, Georgia, Georgia School of Technology (later Georgia Tech), Kentucky, Mississippi A&M (later Mississippi State), North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington and Lee, and Virginia Tech. In 1923, the conference changed its name to the Southern Conference. State College remained in the Southern Conference until 1953, when along with Duke, North Carolina, Maryland, South Carolina, Wake Forest, and Clemson, it withdrew to form the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Until 1921, all teams had used the nickname, "Red Terrors." In 1921, the State College football team began using the name "Wolfpack." Although prominent State College individuals such as Chancellor J. W. Harrelson disliked the name, it became popular among the student body, and in 1947 "Wolfpack" was adopted as the official nickname of all State College teams.

Although by the latter half of the twentieth century basketball had become the most popular college sport in North Carolina, prior to World War II State College's basketball teams never sold out games and lost as many games as they won. In 1946, State College hired Everett Case to coach its men's basketball team. During his first decade coaching the team, its record was 267 wins and 60 losses, including six straight Southern Conference titles, three straight Atlantic Coast Conference titles, and six of seven Dixie Classic tournaments. Case retired in 1964 after popularizing college basketball not just at State College, but all over North Carolina and the Atlantic Coast Conference.

The racial integration of athletics at State College began in 1957, when African Americans Manuel Crockett and Irwin Holmes joined the track team. The integration of the most popular, money-making sports, however, did not begin until 1966, when Marcus Martin, a walk-on, became the first African American football player. The first African American scholarship football player, Clyde Chesney, joined the team in 1969. In 1973, basketball player David Thompson was the first African American N.C. State University athlete to be named All-American in any sport.

In 1972, two students, Kathy Bounds and Deb Webb, organized an N.C. State women's basketball team, and in 1974, the Athletics Department agreed to support it as an intercollegiate team. The women's intercollegiate athletics program at N.C. State expanded rapidly after 1975, when athletics director Willis Casey hired Sandra Kay Yow. Yow and her assistants organized women's volleyball, softball, rifle, and fencing teams in rapid succession, and women also began to join the swimming and tennis squads. Susan Yow, on the basketball team, became the first woman N.C. State All-American in any sport in 1976. As of 2006, N.C. State had eleven men's and eleven women's varsity athletic teams in the Atlantic Coast Conference, which consists of twelve colleges and universities in East Coast states from Massachusetts to Florida.