This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2008, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Utah Valley University will announce today at a noon news conference at the McKay Events Center that it is joining the Great West Conference, according to a spokesman in the athletic office.
The conference, up until this point, has been a football-only league, and includes Southern Utah University. This upcoming year will be the first to include other sports.
The announcement is especially welcome news for a basketball program that previously had been independent.
"It's definitely a great step for us," said Dick Hunsaker, the men's basketball coach. "It's great for the student athletes to have a sense of belonging and it's a chance for us to be able to compete for a league championship."
UVU will compete in the conference in every sport except wrestling - which has its own separate conference - and football, a sport in which the Wolverines do not field a team.
The schools UVU will compete with will be North Dakota and South Dakota, New Jersey Tech, Houston Baptist and Texas Pan American. North Dakota and South Dakota will compete in football as well, against the league's pre-existing members. They replace North and South Dakota State, who left the league for the Missouri Valley Football Conference.
In basketball, UVU will be eligible for an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament next season, though the conference won't hold an automatic bid. To get one, according to the UVU spokesman, the conference needs six core schools to compete at the Division I level for six seasons. Utah Valley has just finished its probationary period with the NCAA. The other schools competing in the conference haven't met that requirement yet.
Still, this is an important step for UVU to take, a step that relieves the school of the albatross that is independent basketball. Although it will be extremely difficult to attain an at-large bid to the big dance, having a conference is bound to help recruiting, and it guarantees home games in the meat of the season.