We’ve all had the thought before. What if I won the Mega Power Millions Ball lottery and had more money than I could ever spend in a lifetime? What would I spend it on? Well, if you’re a rabid college sports fan you might have the inclination to become the next T. Boone Pickens, Kevin Plank, or Phil Knight, and give your favorite athletic department the resources to compete with the biggest of the big boys in the power conferences. How would you do it and what are the best ways to spend the money to attract the nation’s top amateur athletes to your school? I know what I would do at UMass.
The arms race in athletic department spending has exploded over the past two decades, with colleges competing to outdo each other year after year. The nation’s top prospective student athletes have become used to being wooed on their college visits with shiny new locker rooms featuring custom millwork, hand cut leather seating, top of the line sports medicine facilities, and so much free gear you could wear it to every class every semester. So if you really want to stand out from the field you need to come up with some very creative ways to make your school more attractive than the rest.
Student Athlete Dorms:
If you want your new found fortune to make a big impact in recruiting get ready to build some of the best student athlete specific dorms in the country. Yes, other schools already have been doing this for years, most famously with Kentucky featuring Coach Cal in an MTV Cribs style video showing off all the amenities the Wildcat basketball players have in their dorm, but we could do even better at UMass and stand out from the rest. Location is key and it would make the most sense to build the athlete dorm complex on the corner of Massachusetts Ave and Commonwealth Ave across from Boyden. You are in short walking distance to most of the athletic facilities and there is enough land to build almost anything you want. The amenities have to have the “wow” factor. Room service from the #1 dining facilities in the country, movie theater with stadium seating, four lane bowling alley, indoor pool with slides surrounded by a lazy river with retractable glass windows that can be opened during warm months, smoothie bar staffed by team nutritionists, private bedroom suites with kitchen and living rooms, and a day spa to help with recovery after practice. You’ll get recruits to visit campus that you never had a chance with before.
Practice Facilities:
Thanks to tremendously generous donations from Marty Jacobson and John Kennedy, UMass has made major strides when it comes to practice facilities in the last decade, but if we want to keep up with the perennial national title contenders we’ll need to add to what’s already built. The new bubble is great and has already been incredibly helpful to the athletic department, but you know what’s even better? A permanent indoor practice structure. It can easily be built on the same land where the bubble is currently located and would be enlarged to include a full-size indoor track, four tennis courts, batting cages, and a new aquatics center. Add additional weight rooms and team meeting areas, and it would be a place that all of the athletic programs could use.
Game Venues:
Upgrades have been needed at many of our game facilities for years. This part is more for us, the loyal fans, students, alumni, and boosters, than it is for the athletes. But a good atmosphere to play your games in always helps in giving your team a competitive edge.
We’ll start with the crumbling lump of concrete called McGuirk Alumni Stadium. Sure the performance center and press box were great additions and provide amenities to the fans lucky enough to score VIP access, but what about the rest of the fans? We need to step it up if we want to draw the casual local fans who can fill the stadium and provide a better gameday atmosphere than just my annoying voice echoing into the ref’s ears. The East stands need to be torn down and rebuilt with a two level grandstand, separated by a massively wide concourse featuring large bathrooms and top notch concessions options. There will also be suite boxes for our biggest donors and important guests to enjoy. The key feature to the second level will be an entire two sections built as a terraced general admission area with bar tops and high back stools. You want to be able to walk around and talk to your friends while enjoying the game, you don’t want to be stuck on an aluminum bench. Give it that bar-like atmosphere that will make people want to bring their friends. I’d also add an awning style roof over both the East and West stands, similar to the new roof at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami and many soccer specific venues. Then there is the problem of the students and the student section. How do you convince a bunch of spoiled Generation Z “impress me now” brats to come support their school team inside McGuirk? You bring the only thing they seem to like, inside the stadium. The South end zone would be turned into the “Tailgate Terrace”, a five level parking garage that is terraced to look like stands, has twenty rows of student section seating below, and features a professional DJ booth/sound system. You bring the student tailgate into the stadium and give them no reason to walk back to their dorms when the game starts. And yes, it’s BYOB in the student section, get over it admin, they’re going to be drinking whether they’re at the game or not, so just let it happen.
Next is the slowly aging barn known as the Mullins Center. The once modern state of the art building, while still superior to what many of our rivals have, has been showing its age for years and is in need of an interior renovation. The recent audio/visual upgrades have been awesome and add to the fan experience, but the seating and concourse need a facelift. Similar to my plan with McGuirk, you need to add terraced bar top seating areas at both ends of the arena. Take sections Z,A,B,M,N,P and create general admission club areas, similar to the current Commonwealth Club but now permanent. Add bar concession areas at those locations, and you’d have a hot ticket. Suite box areas could be added on the concourse level on both the East and West sides. Speaking of the concourse, it’s too small. It needs to be expanded, which won’t be easy on the West side of the building, but definitely can be done on the East side. Now with alcohol sales at games, you could add a bar area for pre-game and intermission imbibing.
Some of the other athletic venues on campus deserve a refresh too, such as better stands and viewing locations at Garber field, as well as a complete gut job of Boyden. Those could be day two items when you start making some huge interest on your lottery winnings.
So there you have it, what I would do if I had the funds to personally change the entire trajectory of UMass Athletics. We could add in there increasing coaches salaries and private planes for recruiting trips, but I think if you built the infrastructure I listed above, then a lot of the other issues would just take care of themselves.
Now, does anyone have any winning tickets?
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