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NEWS
| april 8, 2004
Athletics Proposal
Prospect of start-up rests on supporters
Officials discuss the sports expansion
issue and the integral components needed to establish the process.
By Brad
Rollins
The Shorthorn Staff
Supporters of the sports expansion referendum
faced a largely skeptical audience Wednesday evening at the Student
Alumni Association’s general meeting, the first of a series
of campaign stops for three student senators pushing the initiative.
Association members grilled the trio on the cost of their proposal
and the plausibility of fielding a winning football team that could
sustain university and community interest in the expansion. Emerging
as a pattern in discussions of the expansion, football was the focus
with the proposed addition of two women’s sports, golf and
soccer, left largely undiscussed.
Students will vote April 19-20 on whether to authorize a $2 per-semester-credit-hour
athletics fee increase to pay for the sports if the university raises
the entire seed money for the expansions through donations, estimated
by supporters as $2 to $3 million. Student Congress President Josh
Warren wrote the measure.
“I think we all agree that if [the university] is going to
go ‘traditional,’ it’s critical that we get students
involved,” said Ricardo Lopez, an industrial engineering senior
and the association’s president. “But we all agree it
would be at least a couple of years before we saw this fee. Personally,
I don’t think I can justify voting to raise fees for future
students.”
President James Spaniolo said establishing a football program would
be a “multi-year process.”
Later in the meeting, Lopez cited Alumni Association figures indicating
that only 40,000 of about a half-million alumni have contributed
to the university.
“What makes you think these people are going to jump up and
‘magically’ donate now?” he asked.
Business senator Bryan Shaner, who sponsored the referendum with
Liberal Arts senator Jenna Lynn DeHart, said student approval of
the referendum would effectively tell alumni to “put up or
shut up” on an issue that has reappeared regularly since the
university’s team was eliminated after the 1985 season.
“This is our best shot at deciding this identity crisis that
the university has had for years. We don’t know who we are
[as an institution] and we don’t know where we’re going,”
he said. “But we love to talk and talk about talking and meeting
and meeting about meeting. I say: Let’s find out if the university
wants football and then move on.”
Chris Ballenger noted lackluster attendance at other sports and
asked if students and alumni could be counted on to attend games
if a football team did not win consistently in early years.
“How do you plan to keep student morale up when they see a
team that isn’t winning?” the economics sophomore asked.
Athletics Director Pete Carlon, who said he attended to answer questions,
told the group that a new team would not immediately start Southland
Conference play but would begin by playing NCAA Division II and
III teams and work towards a Division I-AA schedule. He said his
own research has focused on teams like McNeese State which competed
for a national championship in 2002, two years after resurrecting
their program.
“I would think we would shoot for a team that could compete
at a very high level relatively quickly,” he said.
CORRECTION
This article inaccurately combined a reference
to two university football programs that Athletics Director Pete
Carlon said might be used as models if a team is approved here.
It should have said McNeese State, the 2002 Southland Conference
champion, is an example of a longtime successful program that UTA
might emulate. Southwestern Louisiana University, which fielded
a team for the first time in 2003, was cited as a potential model
for a successful start-up.
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