On Mizzou's Alden and Moore; and Giambelluca gets some pub

The Columbia Tribune on Sunday marked the 10th anniversary of Mike Alden's reign as athletic director at the University of Missouri with a question-and-answer format story on its sports section front page.

You can read the interview here, and interestingly, just as Southeast Missouri State bumped the operating expenses of all of its athletic programs for 2008-09, Alden anticipated a 20 percent increase in travel expenses for his programs this year. This concludes the interview:

 

As we built our budget for next year, we put in the travel budget for all our teams and put it in place for what we knew and then just tacked on 20 percent immediately. But it’s a moving target, and you have no idea. Let’s say your budget is $5 million for travel. Immediately it’s $6 million, and we have no idea if we’re going to hit that. When we put the budget together, gas prices were $3.49 a gallon. Now they’re $3.99 a gallon. Today, it probably should have been 22 or 23 percent. So it absolutely impacts how we operate as an organization. How is it going to affect our turnstiles? Are people going to elect not to drive to our games? We don’t know. Everyone in sport and entertainment are concerned with that right now. It’s kind of the fear of the unknown.

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Speaking of Mizzou athletics, the Tribune today had a story on William Moore, the defensive back from Hayti. 

The story begins with the scene when a Mizzou caravan that included Moore, Alden and others stopped in Hayti, where Moore was the center of attention.

 

 

Giambelluca recognized in stories

I had the opportunity to meet Sam Giambelluca for the first time this year at the Poplar Bluff Gridiron Awards Banquet.

He is a mover and shaker in the sports scene in Poplar Bluff, and was featured in a front-page spread in the Daily American Republic on Sunday.

Here's the feature on Giambelluca, and the story on his retirement as chair of the Poplar Bluff Museum. He will continue to serve as chair of the Poplar Bluff Sports Hall of Fame.

Van Slyke has moved on

As I watched the Detroit Tigers pummel the Kansas City Royals 19-4 on Monday night at Kauffman Stadium, and the crowd thinned out from about 14,000 into just a few hundred, I was tempted to go down close enough to ask Tigers first base coach Andy Van Slyke where his son was going to school this year.

Jared Van Slyke, who played briefly in one game at quarterback during his freshman season at Southeast, is not on the roster for the Redhawks this year. An interesting turn since he was one of the bright spots of the spring game in the receiver role when he caught three balls for 93 yards and the offense's lone touchdown.

Jared Van Slyke said after the spring game: "It felt good. This is what you dream about when you're a kid — come out and make plays and prove yourself."