Utah Valley — aka ‘Transfer U’ — has its sights set on a WAC championship

Orem • Glance at Utah Valley’s basketball roster and the trend is easy to spot: Of the 16 Wolverines listed, all but three started their collegiate careers somewhere else.

“We talk about this being Second Chance U all the time,” Utah Valley coach Mark Pope said. “I mean that in the most positive sense because I love these guys. Everybody has taken a little bit of a crooked path to get here … and they come in with a big chip on their shoulders. They come in with something to prove.”

And as the Wolverines look to make their mark on the Western Athletic Conference this season, Pope and his players hope those winding paths to Utah County will lead them to wins on the basketball court.

“We’re an experienced group,” said Brandon Randolph, a guard who transferred from Xavier. “That’s the good thing about having a lot of transfers is that we’ve been through it before. We know what to come in and expect.”

The Wolverines have three guys who started at Salt Lake Community College and three more who transferred in from BYU. Oklahoma, Kent State, Eastern Michigan and Utah are also listed under “previous schools” on the Wolverines’ roster.

“We have a bunch of players that bring a bunch of stories and different skill sets with them,” said former Ute Kenneth Ogbe. “Coach Pope does a great job getting guys. He makes you have fun playing the game again.”

Pope, in his third season as UVU’s head coach, had a senior-heavy roster his first season, which meant he essentially had a blank canvas as he put together his first recruiting class.

“It gave us an old team, and I like having an old team,” Pope said. “It’s really good for us. And we were able to recruit way better talent, for the most part, in transfers than we would have if they were freshmen. The signing day celebration, all the hoopla, the transfers are over that. They know exactly what they want, and it’s usually different stuff than the sparkle of the name.”

What Pope and his players want now is to win.

The Wolverines start their season this weekend with a daunting back-to-back at Kentucky and Duke, two of college basketball’s powerhouse programs. They hope that experience combined with the experience they’ve collected along their paths to Orem will help them land a spot in the NCAA tournament come March.

“There’s just so much that can happen for us this season,” said former BYU Cougar Isaac Neilson. “We’re all excited. We’ve all worked really hard and put in a lot of time preparing for this.”