March 18, 2003
By STEVE HERMAN
AP Sports Writer
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) – IUPUI’s acting chancellor, Bill Plater, remembershikingin the Smoky Mountains and meeting a fellow hiker who saw themonogrammedbaseball cap he was wearing.
“What’s an IUPUI?” the man asked.
“I said, ‘Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis,”‘ Platerrecalled. “He said, “Sounds like a basketball game,’ and moved on.”
How appropriate.
The amalgam of the state’s two largest universities achieved itsgreatestnational exposure last week by winning the Mid-Continent Conferencetournament and an automatic bid to the NCAA basketball tourney.
“This is what college basketball is supposed to be about,” IUPUI coachRonHunter said. “We went out and got our dream. When I’m on a bus and ‘GoodMorning America’ calls, that means people already know who we are.That’swhat making the tournament is supposed to do for us.”
Many people are still wondering just who or what this palindromicuniversityis all about.
“The name has been a mystery to most people outside higher education,”Plater said. “These days, academics readily recognize IUPUI, but not thepublic. IUPUI has been working toward a sense of identity andrecognitionfor many years. This helps build our pride and helps make our campusbetterknown locally and nationally.”
The university prefers to be called IUPUI instead of what otherwisemight bethe longest name in college sports. It is part of the state’s regionalcampus system and offers programs not available to students at the maincampuses in Bloomington and West Lafayette.
The Indianapolis campus opened just west of downtown in 1969 and now hasanenrollment of more than 29,000 students from 48 states and 125countries.Similar Indiana-Purdue campuses, although smaller, are in Fort Wayne(whichmoved up to Division I sports this year) and Columbus.
Men’s basketball was IUPUI’s first varsity sport, starting in 1972-73,andis still played in a 2,000-seat gym across the hallway from theuniversity’sworld-class swimming facility, which seats almost 5,000 and was the siteoffour of the past five U.S. Olympic Trials.
About the time IUPUI’s move to Division I was approved in 1997, theuniversity changed its nickname from the “Metros,” which was adoptedoriginally to reflect its urban status, to Jaguars.
“No one was ever happy with Metros as a name,” Plater said.
One thing IUPUI hasn’t been able to shake, however, is the flippantpronunciation of the identifying string of initials as “Ooey-Pooey,”whicheven fans and alumni have used for years.
Plater doesn’t like it, though.
“Ooey-Pooey was never a good idea,” he said. “It is unfamiliar and evenalittle hard to say I-U-P-U-I, and if the acronym makes peopleuncomfortablewhen they use it, we are very glad to give them an alternative: Jaguarsdoesjust fine.”
