EDITOR'S NOTE: This story is part of GCU's history page. All the stories can be found here:
GCU History Page | The GCU story | Grand 'Construction' University | A campus culture like no other | GCU timeline | Then and now | Did you know…? | Brian Mueller and the 'Phoenix 50' | Pioneering online education | Rise of athletics | The next 75 years
Over Grand Canyon’s first six decades, a triumphant tradition of melding academics with athletics enhanced the culture and climate of campus life. GCU Athletics, with that base in place, was ready to radiate more energy and a bigger spotlight once the 2013 elevation to NCAA Division I matched the rise of the university.
The purple, black and white Lopes have carried the university flag across the nation’s courts, fields, tracks and pools with an unmatched success level for universities that transitioned in the 2000s to Division I — the nation’s highest level of intercollegiate athletics.
GCU was unable to participate in postseason competition during its initial four-year transition period, but the Lopes still accrued 57 regular-season or postseason championships during their first 10 years in the Western Athletic Conference.
“The difference in being Division I and either Division II or Division III is such a huge gulf,” said GCU President Brian Mueller, who joined the university in 2008 when the athletic department was competing in Division II. “What you’re trying to accomplish is much the same for the athletes. You want it to be an educational experience, to display the excellence of the institution and to be something that brings the university together, creating a community.
“But the fourth thing is the attention the university gets. The gulf between what you get in attention as a Division I institution and a Division II institution is just huge. So the decision was made early on that if we’re going to participate, we’re going to participate at the highest levels. It was the right thing to do, and it has been a bigger plus for us than we even thought it was going to be.”
As Grand Canyon College, the Lopes enjoyed a rich NAIA athletics tradition before joining the NCAA as a Division II program in 1990 and the modern move to a thriving 21-sport Division I program.
The Lopes won 10 national championships, most prominently in men’s basketball (1975 and 1978 NAIA titles) and baseball (1980, 1981, 1982 and 1986 NAIA titles). GCU won Division II national championships in men’s soccer (1996) and men’s indoor track and field (2012). The latter contributed to the Lopes claiming the Directors’ Cup, awarded for overall athletic program excellence, in their final two Division II membership years (2011-12 and 2012-13).
The transition to Division I was already in the works thanks to the commitment of Jerry Colangelo, a Phoenix sports icon who built an academic relationship with GCU by lending his name to its sports business program before it was put on the College of Business.
Colangelo arranged a campus meeting with then-NCAA President Mark Emmert in 2011, when a 5,000-seat GCU Arena opened on campus. The arena was expanded to 7,000 seats in 2014.
A year after Emmert’s campus visit, the Western Athletic Conference invited GCU to become a member and compete at the Division I level.
“GCU has a number of things attractive about it,” then-WAC Commissioner Jeff Hurd said. “One is geography. One is ease of access to the city. Another is the multisport sponsorship it has. Another is the expansion of its campus and its academic programs. It has shown enormous growth potential.”
The Lopes boldly committed to compete immediately, hiring big-name coaches in men’s basketball (former NBA star Dan Majerle) and men’s soccer (former NCAA championship and MLS Cup coach Schellas Hyndman) and winning WAC softball and women’s indoor track and field championships in the first year.
GCU laid out a plan to upgrade facilities, leading to the opening of a 6,000-seat GCU Stadium for men’s and women’s soccer in 2016, a 4,000-seat GCU Ballpark for baseball in 2018 and a 1,200-seat GCU Softball Stadium in 2018.
Every facility was built on campus, as GCU committed to enhancing its rapidly expanding enrollment’s experience by immersing athletics with the student body.
Having taken over a campus of less than 1,000 traditional students, Mueller knew GCU did not have the alumni fan base for an immediately robust atmosphere. He envisioned creating a notable student section from scratch, particularly where the most attention would be garnered for men’s basketball games.
GCU devoted every courtside section on GCU Arena’s east side to its students, dubbed the Havocs, and built from scratch what is regarded as “The Biggest Party in College Basketball.”
With a nod to the Cameron Crazies at Duke or the Phog at Kansas, the Havocs went further and filled the Quad outside the arena for pre-game activity and anticipation and made their “Purple Pregame Party” a must-see before basketball tip-offs.
“If you think about when you go on the road to some of the bigger schools, and they have established traditions, a lot of the programming is for the people who are buying tickets from outside,” Mueller said. “We did the opposite.”
Starting with the 2016-17 season, the percentage of GCU Arena capacity was at least 94% for each men’s basketball season outside the pandemic-limited 2020-21 season.
The success of the GCU men’s basketball program also hit another level with head coach Bryce Drew leading the Lopes to WAC Tournament championships and NCAA tournament berths in two of his first three seasons (2020-21 and 2022-23).
“There is nothing that is like the NCAA basketball tournament,” Mueller said. “It’s absolute magic, and there’s nothing in even bowl appearances that brings the attention and notoriety to a school like making a run in the basketball tournament does. It gets people focused who don’t pay attention to college athletics all year, and it’s all so positive. It’s college sports at its best.”
The men’s basketball spotlight is just part of the shine of a Lopes program that won the all-sports WAC Commissioner’s Cup for all five completed athletic seasons between 2017-18 and 2022-23.
GCU baseball, beach volleyball, men’s and women’s golf, men’s and women’s soccer, softball, men’s and women’s tennis, and men’s volleyball each has punched at least one ticket to an NCAA regional or tournament. Track and field and swimming and diving produced All-Americans with individual NCAA Championships qualifications.
“In its first 10 years as an NCAA Division I institution, GCU has proudly earned 57 conference championships and five Commissioner’s Cups, an honor awarded to the top performing athletics program,” said GCU Vice President of Athletics Jamie Boggs, a Phoenix native who has led the program since 2019. “The foundation of our success is our university’s culture, which we call the 4 Cs: community, collaboration, continuous improvement and Christ-centered. Our role as an athletics program is to add one more ‘C,’ and that is ‘championships.’”
