A crowd of 30,000, all dressed in navy blue and red, fills the newly-built FAU on-campus stadium. The fans cheer loudly as the Owls rush onto the field through a billow of dry ice. They celebrate as the FAU football team finally has a home to call its own.
Making that dream a reality is the task of two men: FAU Head Football Coach Howard Schnellenberger and Athletic Director Craig Angelos.
The easy part of the task came in October when the FAU Board of Trustees unanimously approved the construction of the football stadium.
Now comes the hard part: funding the project and having a facility ready to host a game by the 2010 season. Feverishly working to that end is Angelos. Once the BOT gave the green light, Angelos began to implement a multi-step strategy with the goal of getting construction under way by this summer. In the aftermath of a surprise New Orleans Bowl victory over Memphis, Athletic Department officials are hoping for a groundswell of support towards getting the stadium funded sooner than originally thought.
“We’ve established the amounts of what everything is going to cost and we have put together a brochure. Now we have to go out and sell it in the next six months,” Angelos says from his conference room, dotted with stadium renderings and a large panoramic photograph of the 2003 DI-AA semifinal game against Colgate, what many considered to be FAU football’s finest hour until this season’s Sun Belt upset of Troy and New Orleans Bowl victory.
Homeless
FAU football, in its seven years, has never had a home to call its own. It has played “home” games at Dolphin Stadium in northern Miami-Dade County and for the last several years at Fort Lauderdale’s dilapidated Lockhart Stadium, a glorified high school sports ground with locker rooms too small for a football team.
“We are playing for the future,” says FAU senior linebacker Cergile Sincere after his last game at Lockhart, a dramatic 34-31 win on Nov., 10 over conference rival Arkansas State in front of a sparse crowd that almost filled up half of the 20,000 metal benches and decrepit plastic chairs.
From the program’s inception it has been the vision of Schnellenberger to get his Owls in an on-campus stadium. He has recruited players like the gritty, undersized Sincere, to come to Boca Raton with no guarantee that they would ever play an actual “home” game.
“I’ll be happy to come back, watch a game in the new stadium and be proud that I started this,” Sincere says. While it has taken a little longer than anticipated, things are finally coming together, and Schnellenberger can now promise recruits with near certainty that before their careers are over they will play in a new stadium.
“There is only one thing that has the power to bring all facets of FAU together and that is to be in our own stadium, on our own campus, with our football team taking on some major competitor with an opportunity to win the game,” Schnellenberger, 73, says as he clenches his right fist and a look of determination sweeps across his aged face.
What to Build?
Schnellenberger’s original dream included a domed stadium that could house football and basketball games as well as concerts and other events, but the costly concept never materialized. The next option was to build an “Innovation Village” that would generate revenue from dorms and stores that could support the construction of a $98 million concrete bowl stadium. That price tag also seemed a little too steep for the fledgling FAU Athletic Department, so Angelos began to formulate a contingency plan that would make more sense.
What he settled on was a much more cost effective option: a steel structured stadium. However, there were questions about whether such a facility would hold up to the South Florida climate.
“People thought maybe that a steel structure wouldn’t thrive down here in South Florida because of the heat and humidity and the salt air,” Angelos says. “The Orange Bowl is a steel structure that has been around for 70 years. FIU is building a steel structure.”
Three Elements
Without the Innovation Village project as a revenue stream, Angelos is the one being innovative in his fund-raising methods. He looked north to Orlando and the University of Central Florida, FAU’s brethren in the state education system. UCF played its first football games this fall at a 45,000-seat steel-structured stadium on campus.
Once it was determined that the steel facility made sense financially and realistically, the next step, currently in progress, is paying for it all.
According to Angelos, there are three elements to getting the stadium financed: philanthropic gifts, the advanced sale of suites and premium seating, and advertising and sponsorships inside the future stadium.
FAU, as a program in just its seventh season of competition, is only in the beginning stages of developing the kind of support that is found at other football bowl subdivision programs. Within Florida, larger state universities like the University of Florida, Florida State University, the University of South Florida and UCF have been playing football longer than the Owls and have a solid, financially contributing fan and alumni base. At FAU, Athletic Department administrators are forced to scrape together whatever they can get. Winning the Sun Belt Conference and becoming the fastest football program to win a bowl game will help the FAU profile rise and the fan base expand.
A Tough Sell
Compounding the monetary issues are the picky customers who make up the South Florida sports market. The University of Miami, which has been one of the most successful college football programs in the country over the last 20 years, often draws sparse home crowds at the Orange Bowl, despite only playing at home about seven times a year.
“South Florida is a tough market,” Angelos notes. “The transient population and the multitude of entertainment options contribute to that.”
As if a trickle of funds and fickle fans weren’t problems enough, FAU’s status as a member of a lower level conference puts it at a distinct disadvantage behind the six major Bowl Championship Series conferences.
In college football there are six big money leagues whose members reap the benefits of an automatic bid to a BCS bowl game if they win their conferences. The Sun Belt has no such guarantee, as the winner of the Sun Belt FAU gets an invitation to play in the New Orleans Bowl. The problem is that the team that derives that honor loses money in the short term. While it generates national attention for the program, it ends up costing a lot of money to travel to a site for several days and play the game. FAU required two charter flights to carry the traveling entourage to New Orleans. The team stayed in the New Orleans Sheraton for five nights before returning home the morning after the game. The New Orleans Bowl offers the second lowest payout of any bowl game played in the FBS.
Angelos, aware of all the potential pitfalls associated with the stadium and the difficulties of running a program like FAU’s, is taking a realistic approach.
“There are some games that we will play against top competition that we will sell out,” Angelos says. “Other games attendance may not be so high.”
Angelos is hoping for a big philanthropic gift, upwards of $20 or $25 million for naming rights to the stadium. Beyond that, anyone can pay money to put a name on other parts of the facility, from the four cornerstones to the press box, scoreboard, training room and suites. Even the lockers’ names are for sale. Officials are hoping the bowl victory over Memphis in New Orleans will inspire donations.
“We fully expect that when we come on campus and when we are playing every game in Boca, the interest level and the quality of our team will steadily increase our attendance,” Angelos says. “You have to plan for the future.”
However, it is Schnellenberger’s grand plan that Angelos is carrying out.
“The real rewards of college football will be derived as we move on campus … and the students, the faculty and the staff will get the pleasure, the camaraderie and the school spirit that comes on a Saturday afternoon. Those that live on campus can simply walk to the game, and the staff and the faculty can come back into their own parking places and spend the day on campus,” the old ball coach says. “When the alumni can bring their children back to the school that they attended, it’s particularly nostalgic. That’s what football is all about.”
Some $62 million can make it all happen.
