Published: November 11, 2008 11:12 am      

What now?

Alumni, ECU officials speak out on future of Tiger football program

Ada — The end of a losing football season has become something of a November rite of passage at East Central University.

And when the 2008 campaign — ECU’s 12th sub-.500 season in the past 15 years — concluded Saturday in Durant with the Tigers’ annual rivalry showdown against Southeastern, Kurt Nichols’ three-year run as head coach also officially came to an end. Nichols’ departure put East Central football at a crossroads once again and left the school administration searching, not just for a coach but for a Messiah to lead the struggling program out of the football wilderness.

Plagued by outdated facilities and a shortage of full-time staff and operating capital, ECU has had just three winning seasons (all of them either 6-4 in 2001 and 2004 and 6-5 in 2000) since capturing the NAIA national championship in 1993. In three seasons under Nichols, the Tigers had won just three of 14 Lone Star Conference North Division games and were 7-of-31 overall when they boarded the bus for Durant Saturday morning.

Days before the team left for its season finale and Nichols’ firing became official (today), athletic director Brian DeAngelis had already begun the search for his replacement; months before the season even began, though, DeAngelis and ECU president Dr. Richard Rafes were searching for ways to move the school’s football program — and athletics as a whole — in the right direction.

If their search is succesful, it could ultimately lead to a pot of gold at the end of a financial rainbow that will put ECU on equal athletic footing with the other schools in the Lone Star Conference. At this point, though, Rafes and DeAngelis have a long way to go.

During the 2007-2008 school year, the budget for ECU athletics lagged at or near the bottom of the LSC in virtually every sport, with football facing the biggest deficit when compared to other schools in the conference. The operating budget for football (minus salaries) was just $75,000, which was well below the league average of $129,541 and far behind the $199,352 that ranked No. 1.

ECU’s baseball budget of $20,500 was dead last and was just over half the league average and less than a third of the $66,418 that ranked No. 1; the men and women’s basketball programs were at $36,500, or about three-quarters of the average and about half of the league high; and the $18,500 allotted for softball expenses was also dead last and was just over half the league average and about a third of the high figure in the conference.

DeAngelis said steps have already been taken to close the gap between ECU and the other LSC schools.

“The operating budget (for football) is more this year because it’s been supplemented by outside sources,” DeAngelis noted. “It’s hard to say exactly, but it’s at least $10,000 above what we had last year.”

In the two years since Rafes became ECU’s president and the year and a half DeAngelis has been AD, they have made fundraising for athletics a top priority while stressing the importance of winning programs in all sports. Changing football coaches after a fourth straight losing streak (three under Nichols and another under Tim McCarty in 2005) was part of that process.

“We need a new coach first and foremost,” Rafes said last week. “We’re making progress on our facilities, and we’ve put a significant amount of additional funds into the athletic program from previous years.

“I don’t think any problem is unsolveable,” he added. “You need leadership at the top, and that includes support of the alumni, but it also includes getting a coach who can turn the program around. I think that’s the first and most important step.”

With the search for a new football coach already underway, the scramble to provide the tools necessary to help him succeed in one of the nation’s toughest NCAA Division II conferences has also begun. Contracts were approved last week for a new $500,000 strength and conditioning building to replace the outdated Elvan George facility, and another $230,000 has been earmarked for improvements to the grandstand at aging Norris Field — a Depression-era relic that is easily the oldest stadium in the conference.

“It’s true that some of the Texas schools (in the LSC) have superior facilities, but we’re making progress on our facilities,” Rafes said.

ECU’s fundraising efforts over the past year or so have been led by Dr. Gerald Williamson, a longtime faculty member and the school’s interim athletic director for a couple of months before DeAngelis moved into the AD’s office in the spring of 2007.

“Dr. Williamson’s primary area for fundraising is athletics, and his primary area within athletics is football,” Rafes said. “We’re going to talk to the new coach and see what his needs are, then we’ll look at funding and see if we can accommodate those needs. We’re working on a plan to get additional funding for football, and that should help us.”

Former ECU All-American defensive back and current University of Tulsa coach Todd Graham can relate to the problems facing Rafes and DeAngelis as they try to make their football program competitive in a league where the Tigers have been chronic also-rans over the past decade and a half. When Graham left Rice to return to Tulsa (where he had been an assistant two years before) as the head coach prior to the 2007 season, the Golden Hurricane represented a school that not only has the smallest enrollment in Conference-USA but also the smallest in all of NCAA Division 1-AA and was playing in a facility (Skelly Stadium) that was as outdated by 1-AA standards as Norris Field is in the LSC today.

When the 2008 season began, though, Skelly Stadium (built in 1930, the year Norris Field was finished) had been renamed H. A. Chapman Stadium and, after a multi-million renovation project (for which the Chapman Trust footed half the bill), it bears very little resemblance to the facility that was home to TU football for the previous 77 years.

“We had the worst Division I facilities in America when I came here (as an assistant) six years ago,” Graham said. “We’ve put $50 million into the stadium in the last year and eight months. We’ve been able to generate energy and excitment, and now we’ve gone from one of the worst facilities in America to one of the best. That’s what excitement and energy creates.

“When I came here, people said there was no way this could happen, but we’ve done this all with private money,” he added. “People have gotten excited and believed in the program who never had before.”

Graham, who graduated from ECU in 1986 after a celebrated career that covered the first four years of the only five-year winning streak for the program in the past four decades and was later an assistant under Hank Walbrick on the 1993 team that won the NAIA national championship, admitted that, while he still follows the Tigers, he hasn’t been as involved in the program as he would have been if he felt it was getting the support it deserved from the administration. That support, he added, includes hiring a football coach with ECU connections and giving him the tools — and the time — he needs to succeed.

“When we won the national championship in 1993, the program had momentum; there’s no momentum anymore,” he said. “The program hasn’t evolved. They have to change their approach.

“Coach Walbrick was the last coach with ECU ties to coach there, and he won a national championship,” Graham added. “I think they need to look in the ECU family and find somebody who loves the program. I certainly would support somebody like that.”

And, Graham said, the new coach shouldn’t be expected to work an overnight miracle.

“I think the key is to have a vision and a philosophy about what you’re doing with your personnel,” he said. “Whoever you hire, you have to give them time. Sometimes it happens fast and sometimes it doesn’t. You have to lay out a strong foundation and the key is getting people excited.”

Graham agreed with Rafes on the best way to lay that foundation, saying the key to establishing a winning tradition is successful recruiting of school players instead of accepting a quick fix by signing a large percentage of junior college transfers.

“You want some (juco) transfers, but you also want a lot of players who are going to be there for four years,” he said. “I think it takes time for kids to get acclimated to college life. We like to bring them in and redshirt them and get them used to being here. When people spend four or five years at a university, you develop great team unity.

“The key to taking that route is patience,” Graham added. “To me, it’s unfair to bring in a coach who recruits a class and gets fired before that first class graduates. If he stays four or five years, then you can evaluate his body of work. We have the No. 1 offense in America right now, and none of the receivers we have now were here when I got here two years ago.”

DeAngelis said helping the new coach — and the football program as a whole — succeed will be one of his major goals as the 2009-2010 school year approaches.

“You try to get the next coach the best amount of resources you have available at the time,” he explained. “We want to do some things as a whole that help free up the coach’s time to work on some of those big-picture items. We’ll continue as we have with some of the projects we have on the board to try to help the next coach recruit and train athletes.

“It all depends on how quickly we can get those resources,” he added. “We have to upgrade our facilities. That’s going to be the biggest key to recruiting.”

The Elvan George Building at the north end of Norris Field currently doubles as a weight training facility and a locker room for the football team. In addition, it houses meeting rooms and a locker room for the football staff and a first aid and small trainer’s room to deal with injuries. DeAngelis said once the new weight training building is completed, the Elvan George can be transformed into a more player-friendly football facility.

“The hope is that once the strength and conditioning center is done and the weights can be moved out, we can transform (the Elvan George) into a bigger locker room and something that can help the day-to-day operation of the football program,” he said.

And, despite the current state of ECU’s athletic facilities and budget in comparison to the other schools in the LSC, DeAngelis said he believes all of the school’s sports programs are moving in the right direction.

“I think we’ve got more people in the community engaged with the program than we have in a long time,” he noted. “We have things set up to help the athletes academically, and we have financial mechanisms set up to help pay off their tuition.

“We’ve made more improvements on the statium in one year than they had in the last 20,” DeAngelis added. “We’ve tried to kick-start the progression as quickly as we can.”

When Nichols took the ECU job in December of 2005, recruiting was well underway under McCarty (who left suddenly to become assistant head coach at Kansas State), and all of McCarty’s assistants were retained by Nichols. But ECU still has just three full-time paid assistants (offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Chuck Hepola, defensive coordinator Robert Rubel and linebackers coach Todd Fugett, the longtime former defensive coordinator and the interim head coach while the search for a fulltime replacement goes on.

By comparison, most other schools in the LSC have at least six fulltime assistants, and DeAngelis said Nichols’ replacement will have a lot of latitude where his staff is concerned.

“The new coach will definitely have the freedom to hire and fire assistants,” DeAngelis said. “We’ll retain the current staff now, but the next coach will have the freedom to make changes. I think we’ll definitely have to hire one or two additional coaches down the road if they are needed. Dr. Rafes and I are totally committed to the football program, and we’ll do everything in our capability to give the next coach what he needs to be successful.”

Another former ECU football standout, Craig Scheef, said a lot of the problems facing the football program can probably be solved with a comprehensive plan designed to move the program forward in stages.

“They need to find a Point B that the program needs to get to, then identify the resources necessary to be able to do that in terms of staff, recruiting budget and those things and put a price tag on that,” said Scheef, who was a two-time adademic All-American and all-conference lineman at ECU in the early 1980s and is currently president of Texas Security Bank in Dallas. “Then there needs to be a commitment to the university to address a certain portion of that money.

“There needs to be a commitment from the school that if money is contributed for football, it goes to the football program,” he added. “For the football program to be a quality program, certain resource issues need to be addressed, and before it can be addressed by going out and soliciting money from donors, those donors have to be comfortable that the school has a commitment to the program.”

Scheef, who said he attends ECU football games on a fairly regular basis and is “tired of watching (the Tigers) lose”, said he is willing to be one of those contributors if he sees a commitment to the program from the administration.

“I would be willing to make a $10,000-a-year donation for five years if I was sure the school was going to match that,” he said. “What I would suggest the president could do is put together a committee of people who love ECU football and write out a business plan. It has to address everything — facility, coaching salaries, etc. Somebody needs to sit down and quantify what it’s going to take to make a successful program, and the school is going to have to step up and make a commitment, then there’s going to have to be some type of campaign to find x-number of donors who will commit for x-numer of years. Right now, I don’t think there is a belief from people who would make those donations that the unversity is committed to the football program.”

Rafes said the success of the school’s fundraising effort is obviously the key to turning around ECU’s athletic fortunes, and he challenged some alumni who have been critical of his performance in that area so far to step up and contribute more than words.

“It doesn’t bother me for somebody to write me a letter or tell me that they’re not happy with the football program if they’ve written (the school) a check,” he said. “It’s frustrating when somebody will complain about the program and they haven’t given a dime to move the program forward. Some of our critics haven’t given a dime to the program.

“I think the community expected a change overnight,” Rafes said. “It doesn’t happen overnight. I think the expection of turning a program around that quickly isn’t a fair expectation. Now we’re in a position where we can turn it around. We’re excited about it. We’ve got the right athletic director to move the program forward, and we have the right attitude to move it forward.”