Unless you are a native Iowan, a descendant of Midwestern Quaker pioneers, an NAIA college sports junkie or, apparently, a student-athlete from a Utah high school, you may have never heard of William Penn University.
With all due respect to the fine folks of Oskaloosa, Iowa, the Deseret News was oblivious to the Statesmen's athletic program (and to the fact that William Penn invented Pennsylvania, not the tennis ball). The innocent ignorance ended when press releases began flooding the sports department's e-mail by the gigabytes last fall.
Turns out, Utah has become quite the William Penn pipeline. Forty student-athletes from the Beehive State currently call the dorms at the Iowa institution home.
Of course! Nothing strange about dozens and dozens of Utah teenagers relocating 1,200 miles to attend a tiny Quaker-founded private liberal arts college in the middle of, um, rural heaven to play sports at an obscure Midwest Classic Conference school, is there?
Join the crowd if you, too, find this campus connection surprising.
"Who would have thought?" said Penn soccer goalie Sarah Ridley, a Ben Lomond High graduate. "I was completely shocked to find out how many were here from Utah."
It's not like the athletes come from the same suburb, either. One of the Utah volleyball players, Vanessa Bodeni, is from Monument Valley. Basketball player Trisha Merrill is from Richmond, up north. Soccer standout Megan DeGering hails from Oakley. Others left St. George, Mount Pleasant, Vernal, Heber City, Delta, Roy, Cedar City, Murray, even Fayette in Gunnison Valley, for Oskaloosa.
The Penn women's soccer team looks — oh my heck! — like Team Utah East. A whopping 20 players could tell you directions to Crossroads Mall. Eleven of the 15 William Penn athletic programs have players who know what fry sauce is. Even four of the sports faculty members have ties to the Wasatch Front.
They should be called the Utah Statesmen.
"There's tons of people from Utah," said Shay Hansen from Roy. "I didn't know there were that many."
In comparison, the Big Five Utah schools — BYU, Utah, Utah State, Weber State and Southern Utah — have between 142 and 192 Utahns on their rosters. However, the Utah schools also have much bigger athletic departments and school enrollments. William Penn only has 700 full-time students. Plus, the Big Five are, well, in Utah.
William Penn soccer coach Ammon Bennett — with that first name, guess where he's from? — is mostly responsible for building the unlikely recruiting bridge. After graduating from Bonneville High in 1987 and then attending Ricks College, Bennett ended up in Oskaloosa as a track athlete and soccer player. He returned to his hometown, Ogden, in 1997 to work as a sports recruiter at Weber State. Two years later, William Penn hired him as a coach.
It has "started snowballing on us" since then, said John Ottosson, Penn's athletic director and vice president. "It was a slow trickle and then in the last two or three years, it's really exploded."
Ottosson, who grew up in Rose Park and is a West High and Snow College alumnus, also played a role in Iowa's Invasion of the Utahns. In fact, he believes he was the first Utahn to participate in Penn athletics back in the early '80s.
"I'm a Utah native myself," he said. "I enjoy having these kids out here. They're fun to have around."
The other society of Utahns includes Bennett's assistant Bobby Ginn, a Utah County resident from 1992-2001; and assistant football coach Tom Fell, previously at Snow College and Copper Hills High in West Jordan.
Bennett had quick success with a previously horrendous women's soccer program, going 8-8 in his first year. Administration loved those results, so they put him in charge of the men's soccer team while challenging all sports squads to win more. So, naturally, Bennett returned to his roots to pluck talent off of Utah's ripe-but-unnoticed athletic vines.
The Utah-heavy women's soccer program has won two conference titles since. Led by Ridley, Hansen and Kristen Tesch (Alta), the Statesmen won 20 games in a row and finished ranked in the Top 20.
Ridley shattered two NAIA goalkeeping records by allowing only two goals in 1677:30 minutes of action for a 0.11 goals-against average. Hansen, a senior and former Deseret News MVP, scored an NAIA-high 46 goals, two shy of a record. Tesch, a freshman, tied a national record with 25 assists to go with 19 goals.
The Utah union should keep flourishing. Bennett has a lengthy list of 801- and 435- telephone numbers in his speed dial, and he annually calls each high school soccer coach in Utah. He basically begins where BYU and Utah end off.
After compiling about 300 or so names, he starts dialing away. He also gets other Penn coaches in contact with Utah coaches from different sports. That has proved beneficial as well. For instance, Murray's Stephen Kimball participated in two sports for Penn as a freshman: baseball and football. The Penn women's hoops team had a half-dozen Utahns on it. And there's more to come.
  Utahns at William Penn UniversityAdobe Acrobat. | |
"I love Utah. That area is incredibly under-recruited, and there is amazing talent," Bennett said. "You can talk to just about anybody and they'll be interested. All it takes are some phone calls and encouragement to go 1,200 miles out to Iowa."
That's all it took for Ridley, who hadn't played collegiately for two years. "I just got a strange phone call from coach Bennett," she explained, "and that's the end of it. I came out."
Just this past week, Bennett and Ginn pounded the Utah pavement searching for overlooked talent who might follow them to their Iowan soccer field of dreams. They are heavily recruiting about 10 boys and girls from Utah. Bennett figures William Penn could have as many as 60 Utah athletes by next fall.
"It's nice to go back and give Utah kids a chance to play college ball," said Ginn, who coached at UVSC for four years.
Bennett doubts he'll have problems with Penn administrators for bringing so many Utahns their direction.
"I'll continue to do it until the school here stops me," he said, "and they'll let me 'cause we win and they're good kids. You don't have to worry about them doing any dumb things."
Bennett and Ginn don't advertise that they are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — Ottosson is, too — but that fact usually comes up with potential (and mostly Mormon) recruits from Utah and Idaho. When asked, they point out that William Penn has an LDS Institute program, a small-but-growing church branch in Oskaloosa that has doubled in two years and a strong support system with athletes from their area. Ginn calls this a "comfort zone." There are too many Utahns around to get homesick.
If they could only get Iceberg to open up a shake shop there, they'd really feel at home.
E-mail: jody@desnews.com