PROVO — The boy who once entered a Provo High School basketball game with candy stuffed in his socks grew up to be one of Utah Valley’s leading lights.
The Utah Valley Chamber of Commerce made that official Wednesday night, giving its 2025 Pillar of the Valley Award to Elder Matthew S. Holland, former president of Utah Valley University and now a General Authority Seventy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and his wife, Sister Paige Bateman Holland.
The chamber also gave the 2025 award posthumously to the largest distributor in the history of Nu Skin Enterprises, Nathan Ricks. He died Jan. 2, 2023, when the small plane he owned and was piloting crashed at the Provo Airport after it took off for a flight intended to take him and his wife and two friends to the Rose Bowl. His passengers survived the crash.
The awards were presented by former Utah Gov. Gary Herbert during the chamber’s annual gala at the Utah Valley Convention Center. Joyce Ricks received the award on behalf of her husband.
Elder and Sister Holland honored for service to UVU and beyond
During a video tribute to the Hollands, a former Provo High teammate said Elder Holland once stuffed candy in his sock for a high school game when he didn’t expect to play. He shared the candy with his teammate. When the coach suddenly called on Elder Holland to rush into the game, he had no time to remove the bulges of candy still in his socks.
He went on to study at Brigham Young University, Duke, Princeton, Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Oxford. Georgetown University Press published his 2007 book, “Bonds of Affection: Civic Charity and the Making of America.”
Elder Holland served as UVU’s president from 2009 to 2018. He was a surprise choice one year after the school achieved university status.
“Matt was not a full professor. He had not had extensive administrative leadership,” said the former chair of the UVU Board of Trustees, Dan Campbell, in a video tribute. “But Matt, to me, it was like, if you had the ability to draft Michael Jordan, are you going to pass up on that? No way. And he made us look brilliant.”
He laid out a master plan for the university around the idea of creating centers of excellence across campus, board members said. The Hollands set a goal to make Utah Valley University a school where students wanted to be and were proud to attend.
UVU had 26,000 students when they arrived and 37,000 students when they left, surpassing BYU and the University of Utah to become Utah’s largest university.
Elder Holland stepped down in 2018 to accept a call to serve as the North Carolina Raleigh Mission president for the Church of Jesus Christ. During that assignment, he was called to full-time church service as a General Authority Seventy in 2020. He currently serves as executive director of the Church Communication Department.
“We could not have been more deeply touched,” Elder Holland said about receiving the Pillar of the Valley Award.
He gave the credit for the award to Sister Holland and Jesus Christ.
“We know that he lives, and that it is him who all must ultimately praise for the rich experience of life in this treasured terrain of Utah Valley,” Elder Holland said.
Elder Holland said he is astounded by the possibilities for Utah Valley’s next decade leading up to the 2034 Winter Olympics and the bicentennial of the Church of Jesus Christ, given what he called the increasing dynamism of BYU and UVU and the valley’s tech sector.
“Then consider the unique goodness, faith and decency of those who live here and work here,” he said. “In a time of intense economic uncertainty and social discord all over the world, there is great reason to believe that Utah Valley could emerge as a preeminent global example of a community capable of living together in prosperity and peace. ...
“In this grand spotlight, how exciting is it to think that Utah Valley’s best and brightest moments appear ahead.”
Sister Holland attended Provo High’s rival, Timpview High School.
“When I told some of my friends from Timpview that I was marrying a Provo High Bulldog, they said it would never last. I think we’ve proven them wrong,” she said to laughter.
Sister Holland took a class at Utah Valley and earned a communications degree at BYU. At UVU, she became a champion of raising the school’s graduation rates for women. She was a key figure in the launch of UVU’s day care center for student parents, the Wee Care Center. The $6 an hour rate the center charges students has remained the same for 13 years. Two weeks ago, a luncheon for the center raised $488,000.
“This award means so much because we love this valley so much,” Sister Holland said. “To me, Utah Valley has always been a place of safety, of happiness and of endless opportunity.”
Elder Holland paid tribute to her, too.
“She is even more extraordinary than she appears,” he said, “and I don’t know anybody who shines more brightly than she does. ... It means everything to me that this award came to us together. Besides the community pillar I watched Paige become, she has been the absolute pillar of my life. She’s my wisest counselor, strongest ally and greatest cheerleader, even with those Timpview pompoms.”
Kyle Reyes, who served as Elder Holland’s chief of staff at UVU for five years, said the Hollands “show up with grace, class and dignity in all aspects of their lives.”
The prayer for Wednesday night’s gala was provided by Elder Holland’s father, President Jeffrey R. Holland, former Brigham Young University president and current acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Nathan Ricks honored for a life of achievement and building
Nathan Ricks joined Nu Skin in 1989 and later founded One Team Global, a sales organization with more than 500,000 distributors that is responsible for nearly $1 billion in sales of Nu Skin products each year.
Ricks also was a major commercial real estate investor and philanthropist. He and his wife contributed to and helped raise $27 million for the outdoor “Tree of Life” statue exhibit that opened last fall at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi.
“As our family continues to mourn Nathan’s absence, it’s been a blessing to reminisce and analyze how he lived his life,” Joyce Ricks said. “It also has helped us be aware of how he truly loved Utah and he did everything he could to give back to Utah.”
She said her husband began to set goals when he was 14 and then pursued them relentlessly. At first, he was a nervous speaker who would sweat through his shirts. He persevered and made more than 10,000 presentations in his life.
The tribute video for him said that crash investigators found that Ricks performed a maneuver when his plane was going down that led to the survival of his wife and two other passengers.
Like the Hollands, the Ricks are the parents of four children.
Past recipients of the Pillar of the Valley Award
2011: Blake M. Roney
2012: Alan and Karen Ashton
2013: Stephen R. Covey (posthumously)
2014: Ray Noorda (posthumously)
2014: President Dallin H. Oaks
2015: Hal Wing (posthumously)
2015: Wilford Clyde
2016: Rebecca D. Lockhart (posthumously)
2016: Woodbury family
2017: Gov. Gary Herbert
2018: Bill Hulterstorm
2018: JoAnn B. Losee
2019: Ray and Janette Beckham
2019: John Valentine
2021: Alan and Suzanne Osmond
2022: Steve Densley (posthumously)
2022: Carine Clark
2023: Gail Halvorsen (posthumously)
2023: Dr. Richard P. Nielsen
2024: Gail Miller
Correction: Nathan Ricks died in a plane crash on Jan. 2, 2023. An earlier version of this story misstated the date as Dec. 30, 2024.