UNIVERSITY: DIVISION I HELPS TO MARKET SCHOOL

(Second in a series)

Winning is the obvious goal of Southeast Missouri State University's athletic teams, but for the institution itself there is an even bigger prize in its move to Division I greater publicity and increased name recognition. And that can help recruit more and better students, say university officials.

"I believe that in this country people like to be associated with success, with visibility, with being number one," said Richard McDuffie, Southeast's athletics director.

"The whole business of athletics is to win, to strive to be better than you were, so people gravitate toward that," he said.

Athletics is often a key factor in how people view a college or university, said Art Wallhausen, assistant to the president at Southeast.

"If you are perceived as having a second-rate athletic program, unfortunately it seems to carry over in people's minds on the academic side," he said.

Poplar Bluff businessman Carl Ben Bidewell, president of the university's Board of Regents, believes the move to Division I has aided fund raising for both athletic and academic programs at the school.

He noted that many of Southeast's booster club members also contribute heavily to the institution's academic programs.

Some faculty members say it's too early to assess the total impact of Southeast's move to Division I competition. And even university officials concede that it's too soon to tell what impact the move will have on enrollment.

"What we have tried to do and I think we've been successful is to promote the university through our athletics program," said McDuffie. "The primary means to do that is obviously through the media."

McDuffie and other university officials say that since Southeast began playing at the Division I level in intercollegiate athletics in the fall of 1991, the university has benefited from expanded media coverage.

Some of Southeast's football and basketball games are now televised. When the university was a Division II school, televised games were rare, McDuffie said.

This athletic season, 10 of Southeast's games are being aired on television, half of them home and half of them away contests.

Seven of those games two in football and five in basketball are on KBSI-TV, a Cape Girardeau-based station that reaches a 350,000-home region covering Southeast Missouri and parts of Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas.

The area comprises the 75th largest television market in the nation, KBSI officials say.

In addition to the obvious publicity for its sports teams, the television coverage also gives Southeast a chance to advertise its academic success, said Ron Hines, the school's sports information director.

"We get a three-minute segment at halftime and last year we used it to promote the athletic program and the move to Division I," explained Hines. "This year, we chose to highlight academic areas of the university."

On a recent telecast, the university's accounting and finance department was featured in the halftime segment. That's free publicity, said Hines.

If Southeast had had to pay for such publicity, it would have been costly. "If you put that into dollars and cents, you are talking big money," Hines said.

In addition to the coverage on KBSI, the Sports South cable channel is televising three of Southeast's basketball games this season.

Atlanta-based Sports South televises a package of Ohio Valley Conference (OVC) games. Southeast is a member of that conference.

Hines said Sports South reaches 3 million homes, primarily in Tennessee, Georgia and Florida. "Last year, we were on Sports South twice. Both of those games also ran on Sports Channel Cincinnati and Sports Channel Chicago, which boosted it up to over 5 million homes," he pointed out.

In addition, Hines said, Southeast is able to promote itself in a 60-second spot in each of those games broadcast by Sports South.

Radio coverage of Southeast has also expanded. Cape Girardeau-based KZIM serves as the flagship station for the Indian football and basketball radio network.

But Zimmer Broadcasting, which owns KZIM, also airs promotional spots for Southeast on its other radio stations in the region.

Last spring, for example, Zimmer Broadcasting's station in Columbia aired spots promoting Southeast's SEmotion Relays.

"That puts us right in the ballpark with the University of Missouri and the kids in that community," McDuffie said.

Three St. Louis radio stations regularly carry reports on Southeast's games. Ron Shumate, Southeast's head basketball coach, is a semi-regular guest on the Sunday morning sports show on KMOX Radio in St. Louis.

Since moving up to Division I, the scores of Southeast's football and basketball games are carried regularly in major newspapers and on the ESPN cable channel.

ESPN also televises the championship game of the OVC's post-season basketball tournament. The winner earns an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament.

An NCAA rule concerning the movement of schools from Division II to Division I prohibits Southeast from winning an automatic bid until 1997. As a result, Southeast currently can't compete in the OVC's post-season tournament.

But in the future, Southeast will compete in the post-season tournament, which, McDuffie said, should bring greater name recognition for the school.

Kelvin Anderson, a star running back for Southeast last fall, was the subject of feature stories last fall by NBC and the Prime Network cable channel. The latter reaches 4.1 million homes.

Hines said Southeast never received such media coverage when it was a Division II school.

"We have had great football players before when we were Division II, but we never had this opportunity. It is a different game altogether," said Hines.

McDuffie said television is not a big revenue producer for the school. He said he believes the televising of home games actually cuts into ticket sales.

But he said, "We do it because the reason the university went into Division I was to gain greater exposure for the university, not the athletics program."

Allen Gathman, a biology faculty member who serves on the university's budget committee, questions whether the money now spent on Division I athletics could be better spent on directly marketing the school.

"I think most of our students would rather see the money go for academics and keep costs down," he said.

Terry Sutton, a member of the economics department faculty and the university's budget committee, said many of the commuter students in his classes complain that they have to pay an athletic fee every semester even though they attend few, if any, basketball or football games.

But McDuffie said that "when people talk about how much athletics spends of the university's money, I think what needs to be understood is that we contribute back a great deal of exposure that (otherwise) would cost many, many thousands of dollars."

Tuesday: Dan Beebe, OVC commissioner, details his views of Southeast and the Division I conference.