Immediately before coming to Tennessee, Ray Mears coached at Wittenberg College, where he began to implement many of the circus-like activities that he instituted at UT basketball games. At Wittenberg, the players ran onto the court through a cutout of the head of the school mascot, a tiger. In his first season at Tennessee (1962–63), he introduced the tradition of “running through the T” onto the court. The first “T,” built by the student pep club (the Adawayhi Club) was a huge wooden “T” with doors that opened to allow the team to run onto the fieldhouse floor from the locker room. That was soon replaced by a wooden frame in the shape of a “T” covered with tissue paper that was broken by the first player to run through the letter.