In a press conference last week, UVU Director of Athletics Mike Jacobsen announced that the Wolverines will begin playing football in 2011. After being in the shadows of the major universities in the state, UVU will begin the process of implementing a football team as soon as next year.
The search for a head football coach didn’t extend very far; about five miles east on University Parkway to be exact, as Jacobsen extended the job to former BYU coach LaVell Edwards. The BYU legend expressed his desire to get back into coaching, and cited coaching at UVU as the perfect opportunity to do that.
With the addition of a football team, Utah Valley University is expecting an invitation from the Pac-Ten Conference to become its newest member any day now. In fact, USC head football coach Pete Carroll has already extended a welcoming handshake to the university by committing to play the Wolverines in their first game in the new, yet to be announced, 50,000-seat stadium, which will be named after Jacobsen. Construction is set to begin this summer.
The announcement will be made official in a full-page newspaper ad, a la Rick Neuheisel and UCLA, in the UVU Review declaring that the football monopoly in Utah County is officially over. Try-outs for the new football team will be held on September 31, 2010 in the new practice facility, which will also be erected this summer.
