Pioneers

Twice in four seasons the final whistle in an Empire 8 Conference title game left the Utica Pioneers celebrating — in 2019, and again in 2022. Utica University, known as Utica College for most of the football programme's history, has fielded the Pioneers in NCAA Division III since well before that change of name, and the two conference championships mark the clearest run of success the current era of the programme has produced.

Blue and white have stayed the team's colours throughout, worn at Utica University Stadium, a 5,000-seat ground in Utica, New York. Empire 8 games against the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) Engineers and the Washington and Jefferson Presidents have filled recent schedules, conference fixtures that decide standings rather than settle old scores.

Division III does not hand a club the honours that stack up in a professional trophy room, so the 2019 and 2022 titles carry more weight for Utica than the bare fact of two championships three years apart — they are the measure the programme is judged by inside the conference.

That programme goes back to 1946, when Utica first put a football team on the field under the Pioneers name, the identity it has kept through every change to the institution fielding it.