History
The Oakland men's basketball program began competing in the 1967 season, 10 years after the university opened. Originally nicknamed the Pioneers, they won their first NCAA game 109–106 in overtime against Albion. The Pioneers were without a conference until 1974 when they joined the Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (GLIAC).
The first year as members of the GLIAC, Oakland hired Greg Kampe, who is still the head coach at the university. Kampe has the fifth-longest tenure of all active Division I coaches. Oakland won two regular season GLIAC championships, in 1995–96 and 1996–97, their final two seasons in the league. In a 1993 game against Madonna, Oakland scored 91 points in the first half, on their way to a 189–107 victory. That game set school records for most points in a half (98) and largest margin of victory (82). The next three seasons, OU scored more than 100 points 30 times, winning 29 of those games.
Oakland played at the Division II level until 1997 when they changed their nickname to the Golden Grizzlies and began the transition to Division I. OU opened the Athletics Center O'rena in 1998 against Michigan State. The Golden Grizzlies completed the transition to Division I in 1999 and joined the Mid-Continent Conference (now known as The Summit League).
Read more about this topic: Oakland Golden Grizzlies Men's Basketball
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If you look at the 150 years of modern China’s history since the Opium Wars, then you can’t avoid the conclusion that the last 15 years are the best 15 years in China’s modern history.”
—J. Stapleton Roy (b. 1935)
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)