Review offers no plan to improve football

With a price tag of $45,000, a recent review of Southeast Missouri State athletics seems to have left out a couple of items important to Redhawks fans.

No. 1, Upgrading the football program.

No. 2, Upgrading the men's basketball program.

"That wasn't part of our charge," said Bill Carr of Florida-based Carr Sports Associates, which produced the review at the university's request as part of a strategic planning process.

The mission set out by the Strategic Planning Committee's subcommittee on athletics identified seven areas for review, including leadership of the department, fund-raising methodology and Title IX.

"Our charge was to address those seven issues, and we did that," Carr said. "The specificity for each individual sport is part of the plan for that sport."

Board of Regents member James Limbaugh, chair of the Athletics Task Force, agreed that Carr's mission was a more "global" look at the program, a snapshot from "the 5,000-foot level" that would serve as "an overview of the dynamics" of the program.

Limbaugh said now the athletic department and each sports program must begin the planning process that identifies steps to make those programs successful, given their resources.

But the review did include detailed information in several areas covered by Title IX, including specific areas of improvement needed for the women's tennis program. Those areas ranged from the quality of food on road trips to the publication of a media guide to adequate restroom facilities at the tennis complex.

Facilities for the football program were mentioned in passing in the Title IX portion of the review. Coach Tony Samuel and a football participant "rated the team's locker room as poor," the review said.

"We didn't analyze the reasons for success or lack of success for each sport," Carr said. "There are issues with each individual sport. The football locker room, for example, is very humble. It's one of the worst locker rooms in the whole group."

Southeast athletic director Don Kaverman said the locker room at Rosengarten, the team's practice facility, is a priority.

"We have to address that," he said. "We have to, and we have plans for that."

Kaverman noticed, though, how little football or men's basketball was mentioned in the report.

"The largest section in the report has to do with Title IX, and nothing in the Title IX section has to do with making football better or making basketball better," he said. "I think football has a lot more hurdles to overcome than basketball does. The facility, the infrastructure are there for basketball. Not to say we don't have some issues to address there; we do.

"But football has always been a monumental project here, going back to 1991 when the university went to Division I and made it even more of a difficult project."

The review states that the lack of success and the condition of some facilities and infrastructure indicate Southeast "made insufficient preparations and adjustments in resource allocations" for the move to Division I.

The recommendations in the review stress the importance of generating revenue, and Kaverman agrees that money is important in helping the high-profile programs catch up.

"It's all about selling that prospect on your program," Kaverman said. "That's why facilities are important. They're a first impression."

He said that Houck Stadium has improved over the last nine years with a new facade and entry and a new playing surface, which may need to be replaced in three or four years. In addition to the locker room upgrade, Kaverman said Rosengarten "needs a facelift."

"These are things, when you bring a prospect on campus, they look at, and they speak to your commitment to the program," Kaverman said.

He said other parts of the financial formula for football and men's basketball include adequate compensation to retain a good coaching staff, awarding scholarships to the NCAA level, "and then you have to provide the staff with recruiting dollars to go out and fill those scholarships." Summer school financial aid is another factor, Kaverman said.

"It all comes down to money," Kaverman said.

Carr told the Strategic Planning Committee he was asked during a meeting earlier Friday with boosters about specifics that would make the football program successful.

"We have some ideas," Carr said, "but we haven't stated them in here."

Said Limbaugh: "We weren't looking for the magic bullet to see what's going to make football successful. That was not their task. What was their task was, 'How can we lift the program overall where each program can be lifted individually?'"

Limbaugh said two key factors in identifying financial resources for all programs will be increases in revenue generation with better coordination of fund-raising efforts and reallocating existing resources in line where the Board of Regents sets priorities.

"I continue to be very optimistic about what we can accomplish," he said. "We are very impatient as a society, and as stakeholders in athletics, we want it tomorrow. The people who want it tomorrow more than anybody are the coaches, because that's job security. They're behind the 8-ball, and I'm very sympathetic to that."