ROANOKE, Va. — The Virginia Tech football team is honoring the Connecticut school shooting victims and the similar tragedy on its own campus in 2007 with a helmet decal.
The Hokies are in Orlando, Fla., preparing to take on Rutgers on Friday in the Russell Athletic Bowl. The team is wearing a large ribbon on the side of their practice helmets this week.
The decal is half green for Sandy Hook Elementary School and half orange for Virginia Tech with the number 58 in the center. That’s the combined number of victims at the schools in the shooting incidents. It also has the word “Prevail” written across it.
A smaller decal will be placed on the back of the helmet for the bowl game.
“It’s just one of those things that we’ve been through what those people up in Sandy Hook are going through,” Virginia Tech coach Frank Beamer told the Orlando Sentinel on Monday. “We prevailed in Blacksburg. I think if anything, it brought us closer and more determined, and the same thing is going to happen there.
“We’ve got to prevail.”