University of Minnesota Morris - Athletics

Athletics

UMM's athletic teams have experienced varied success during the school's history. The 1970s were marked by success in basketball and football. Olympic wrestler, Dennis Koslowski, wrestled for the Cougars in the early 1980s. After a move in the early 1990s as a non-scholarship Division II and a brief experiment with athletic scholarships, Cougar athletics found a more appropriate home in NCAA Division III's Upper Midwest Athletic Conference. They are the first member of the UMAC to be a public, state-supported institution - all other members over the years were private institutions, usually with a religious affiliation.

Under then-head-coach Ken Crandall, UMM ended a major college football losing streak on September 20, 2003, by defeating Principia College, a Division III team, in Elsah, Illinois 61-28. For nearly nine years, UMM held the NCAA Division II record with 46 games lost consecutively, with the previous win before September 20, 2003 being November 14, 1998. That record was tied on September 22, 2012, when the Lock Haven Bald Eagles lost their 46th straight game, defeated by Edinboro 35-19; the following week, Lock Haven lost 49-6 to Shippensburg, taking sole possession of the record and erasing UMM's name from the record book.

UMM was, in 1993, the first college in the United States to sponsor women's wrestling as an official varsity sport. The program was cut in 2003 due to budget constraints. In 2006, a new men's soccer team was announced.

In 2006, UM Morris opened a new football stadium named Big Cat Stadium, just south of the school's Regional Fitness Center. BCS is also used by the Morris Area High School Tigers. The new stadium replaced Cougar Field which had been used from 1970 to 2005. The school's first football field, named Miller Field, was used from 1961 to 1969.

In 2006, The Cougars captured their first UMAC championship in the Hubert H. Humphry Metrodome signaling the end of coach Ken Crandall's coaching career at UMM. The last conference title for the Cougar football program was the Northern Intercollegiate Conference (NIC) title in 1987, the second of two straight NIC titles. Over the next three years, the Cougars suffered losing records under coach Todd Hickman. In 2010 the team overcame their preseason rating (tied for last) to end the season with a winning record (5-4) and ending in a three way tie for 3rd in the conference.