Athletics began officially at the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts on March 2, 1892 at what is today Raleigh's Pullen Park, when 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 teams of area colleges. After losing badly to the University of North Carolina and Wake Forest, the football team decided that they 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, North Carolina A&M played its first formal (non-scrimmage game) that fall against the University of North Carolina second team, to which it lost, 22-0.

Football remained the most popular sport at the college throughout its first decades of intercollegiate athletics. Its first on-campus game was played in 1907 at the athletic field that would become Riddick Stadium. That same year, North Carolina A&M won the Southern Intercollegiate Association championship, with six wins and one tie. 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 North Carolina A&M's home game played in the Pullen Hall auditorium.

Until 1921, all teams used the nickname "Red Terrors." In 1921, the NC State football team began using the name "Wolfpack," which by 1947 had spread to all other athletic teams as well. Also in 1921, NC State 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. NC State 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.

The racial integration of athletics at NC State began in 1957, when Manuel Crockett and Irwin Holmes joined the track team. The integration of "major" sports, however, did not begin until 1969, when Clyde Chesney became the first African American football player. In 1973, basketball player David Thompson was the first African American athlete to be named All-American in any sport.

In 1974, the first women's athletic team began play, in basketball, and the following year, women's softball and volleyball were introduced. Susan Yow, on the basketball team, became the first woman All-American in any sport, in 1976. Currently, in 2006, NC State has 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.