08/22/2025
Stew Morrill’s homecoming lasted 17 years, with a repeating cycle of victories. The basketball playing and coaching career that had taken him from Provo High School to colleges in four states brought him back to Utah in 1998.
Morrill is about to have another permanent home in the Beehive State. He'll be enshrined and immortalized in the Utah Sports Hall of Fame as part of the powerhouse Class of 2025 along with Mary Kay Amicone, John Buck, Wally Joyner and Holly Rowe.
There's still time to buy tickets to attend the 2025 Hall of Fame banquet and induction, which will take place on Monday, Sept. 22, at the Little America Hotel in Salt Lake City. Visit our website at https://www.utahsportshalloffame.org/ to register. We'd love to celebrate these local legends with you!
As for other Utah ties, Morrill's transplanted roots sank especially deep into Logan and Utah State University. “Five football coaches, four athletic directors, three presidents and one Stew Morrill.” That’s how a Salt Lake Tribune writer once captured his longevity on the campus, amid the seemingly constant turnover in other high-profile positions. His assessment of his performance was always modest; he would just say he “won enough to keep working.”
That’s one way to describe a 402-156 record in those 17 seasons. The 72% winning rate illustrated how he kept maximizing rosters that included only one future NBA player, Desmond Penigar (who appeared in 10 games in the league).
Just the same, Morrill and his staff were known for recruiting and developing players. The likes of Tony Brown, Jaycee Carroll, Gary Wilkinson and Tai Wesley, all from within 125 miles of Logan, became All-Americans.
Having grown up in Provo, Morrill would have deserved Utah Sports Hall of Fame induction regardless of the geography of his 40 years in coaching, after he played for Ricks College and Gonzaga University. He thrived as a head coach at Montana and Colorado State, after working as a graduate assistant at Gonzaga and as an assistant coach at Montana. Yet there’s no doubt that the move to USU would define his career, resulting in the recent naming of “Stew Morrill Court” in the Spectrum, where he won nearly 90% of his home games (248-32).
As he often said, “I didn’t come home to fail.” And as the “HURD” student section chanted, “Whose house? Stew’s house?”
Maybe all of this was foreshadowed in 1862, when the Morrill Act created land-grant colleges such as USU. This coach, and this school, seemingly were made for each other.
Randy Rahe, Weber State’s longtime head coach after being Stew’s assistant at CSU and USU, once observed, “Every once in a while as coaches, you find a perfect fit.”
What’s more, Morrill's success hardly could have come at a better time for USU Athletics. While he was winning at least 21 games in every season from 2000-13 and making eight NCAA Tournament appearances, the football program was continually searching for the right coach and a conference home. His basketball teams were the constant on campus, a rallying point for the community with the power to make Cache Valley winters “more bearable,” as former USU president Stan Albrecht once said.
That’s the kind of influence that Morrill wielded, making his home state forever proud of him.
Utah appreciates what you have done for this state, Stew. Thank you and congrats!
