Name-a-Day Calendar, October 4: Utah Valley Wolverines

Page 332 of 365

Chosen in: Sometime between 1966 and 1971

Chosen by: Student body vote

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The early history of what is now Utah Valley University is either incredibly hard to pin down or was never recorded in the first place.

The school was established in 1941 as Central Utah Vocational School and was originally not ever intended to confer degrees, let alone grow into a giant university. That obviously changed at some point, otherwise this article wouldn’t exist, and that point was the 1960s. After two decades of growth interrupted only by World War II, Central Utah Vocational School became Utah Trade Technical Institute in 1963. Then, in 1967, the Utah State Board of Regents allowed them to award associate degrees, so they changed their name to Utah Technical College at Provo.

At some point between 1963 and 1967, athletics also started at the school, though it’s unclear whether any intercollegiate competition took place. A men’s basketball team dates back to at least 1966-67, but the only available reference from the time—an issue of school newspaper The UTTI Scope from December 1, 1966—just mentions them playing high school teams. The team apparently had no nickname or mascot at this time.

The next available issue of the paper, by this point renamed Tradewinds, is from December 14, 1971. The men’s basketball team reappears in this issue and now they’re matter-of-factly called the Wolverines. How’d that happen?

The best I could find was a 2011 article from the same paper, these days called the UVU Review, by Robert Burnside.¹ According to his research, “multiple sources agree” that, at some unknown point within a few years after the foundation of the school’s athletics program, the student body voted to install the wolverine as their mascot over other unspecified animals. This makes sense within the timeline and places this vote sometime between 1966 and 1971.

Evidently, Wilson W. Sorensen, president of the college from 1946 until 1982, loved the wolverine as a mascot, stating that it suited the school well “because of its small size and fearless attitude”. There’s no mention of whom he had to thank for the suggestion.

Utah Technical College at Provo became Utah Valley Community College in 1987, Utah Valley State College in 1993, and Utah Valley University in 2008. It has continued to grow at a gradual but undeniable pace, to the point that it became the largest university in Utah by enrollment in 2014 and now leads the second-place University of Utah by 9,000 students. Utah Valley is represented by a costumed wolverine named Willy.

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