After a day off from Mission 351 to visit the Vivint.Smart
Home Arena for a Jazz/Spurs NBA contest, it was time for a Saturday
doubleheader starting with Arena #164, the UCCU Center in Orem, UT, for my
first-ever Western Athletic Conference (WAC) game between the host Utah Valley
Wolverines and the visiting Grand Canyon Lopes.
Driving to the campus of Utah Valley, I knew very little about the
school and had no idea what to expect from their facilities. Turns out the school is on a huge building
spree since they made the jump to Division 1 starting in the 2004-05 season and
have a bunch of their sporting venues all clustered together just off the interstate
on campus. While the UCCU Center is over
20 years old, the building looks fairly modern and newer from the outside. What I did find strange, however, was that
their ticket office was inside the building at street level and you then took a
freight elevator up to the concourse level to enter the seating bowl.
On this day, the university was honoring their former
athletics director who led the school on a direct transition from being a
junior college to an NCAA Division 1 institution. Apparently, Utah Valley is the only school to
make that dramatic of a jump without making a stop in a lower-tier division
first. From talking to some of the arena
staff and overhearing some fans behind me, it sounded like UVU doesn’t get a
lot of fans to come out for their games regularly. As such, I expected to see a pretty sparse crowd. As it turned out, this wasn’t the case on
this day as nearly 6,000 people packed into the building for the game. Even though the stands were pretty full, the
student section was still relatively sparse, even with offers of free t-shirts
and free pizza. When it became clear
that these seats weren’t going to be claimed, I was able to score myself a
pretty decent free t-shirt and some free pizza for my $8 ticket!
For the last few seasons, Grand Canyon has probably consistently
been the second-best team in the WAC.
Consequently, I expected a pretty competitive game that GCU would win,
especially given that they played Illinois pretty tough at home early in the
season. As it turned out, Utah Valley was
the dominant team on this day. The
Wolverines built a solid 7-point lead heading into halftime before exploding
for 54 points in the second half, including nearly 30 points in the first 8
minutes after the break, to secure a 92-80 win.
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| The UCCU Center in Orem, UT |
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| Not the biggest, but also not a small arena either |
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| Grand Canyon driving to the hoop in the first half |
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| The Utah Valley marching band aka the Green Men |
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| Raise your hand if you knew Utah Valley was a Great West Conference Champion (or if you knew the Great West was a D1 conference in the past!) |
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