Published: November 16, 2009 10:47 am      

Despite 0-11 ...

East Central officials confident football program moving in right direction

ADA — Less than a week after a 27-26 loss to old rival Southeastern at Norris Field wrote a gut-wrenching — if somewhat fitting — end to an historic 0-11 season, the two men whose futures are most closely tied to the success or failure of East Central University football were understandably more interested in talking about the program’s future than its immediate past.

Head coach Tim McCarty and athletic director Brian DeAngelis were both remarkably upbeat last week in the wake of the first-ever 11-loss season for ECU (or any team in the Lone Star Conference), and it wasn’t simply a case of ‘we’ve got nowhere to go but up’.

McCarty and DeAngelis both stressed the improvement the Tigers — who had 18 freshmen in the starting lineup at one time or another during the season — made over their final five games, and, with Mcarty getting a chance at a level playing field in recruiting this winter, they both seemed to expect ECU to take a giant step forward in 2010.

“I thought the season was successful, even though it was 0-11, because I saw us improve as the season went along, and I saw the kids fighting every week,” said DeAngelis, who took over ECU athletics in 2007 — just over a a year after McCarty had stepped down as the Tigers’ head coach to become an assistant at Kansas State — and was instrumental in re-hiring McCarty to replace Kurt Nichols last December. “I’m ecstatic about where the football program is heading right now.”

“I’m very proud of how my team fought this year,” McCarty said. “The culture we live in is such an instant gratification culture that we miss some of the things that go on. We were able to watch a very young team go out and slug it out with some pretty good teams. The story to me is these guys fought all year, and I have so much admiration for them for that.”

Although recruiting was well underway at other schools before he was re-hired, McCarty assembled an impressive 2009 recruiting class, and several ECU freshmen received honorable mention when the All-LSC North team was released last week. He said an earlier start, coupled with the sweeping upgrade of facilities throughout the athletic department — most notably the addition of the state-of-the-art Pat O’Neal Strength and Conditioning Center and a complete overhaul of the Elvan George Building, which houses the football locker room — since last winter, should guarantee his second recruiting class will be even better than his first, in spite of ECU’s school-record 13-game losing streak over the past two seasons.

“Kids like to play for up-and-coming teams,” McCarty noted. “By and large, they want to see and believe that things are getting better, and I don’t think you have to look very hard at our program right now to see we have a chance to do that.”

“I thought we had a great recruiting class last year,” DeAngelis said. “If we can build upon that, you’d think we’d have something.”

DeAngelis, who has greatly increased the donor base during his relatively brief time in Ada and has overseen the most ambitious program of improvements in the history of ECU athletics over the past year, said a further upgrade to aging Norris Field (which got new aluminum bleachers this fall) is next on his radar.

“We would still like to see artificial turf on the field, and the other thing we need to do is help out the operational budget of the (football) program,” he said. “In time, we would love to expand the press box and put in suites, but those things are aesthetic. The field turf is functional.

“We’re probably two years away from getting new turf (at an estimated cost of $750,000),” DeAngelis admitted. “When I first got here, we were getting minimal help from outside sources, but that has changed. Everything depends on fundraising now if we’re going to make the improvements we need. I think we’re getting very close. We’ve taken steps every year to get closer. We can’t stop until all the projects are done. The Texas schools (in the confernce) aren’t going to stop, and we’ve got to have the same mentality.”

The LSC South dominated crossover contests against the North again this season, but by a wider margin than ever before. Led by nationally-ranked teams from Abilene Christian, West Texas A&M, Tarleton State and Texas A&M-Kingsville, the South won 23 of 25 inter-divisional games this fall, most of them by wide margins.

Norris Field obviously doesn’t meet the standard set by most of the schools in the LSC South and by UCO, Southeastern and A&M-Commerce in the North, but McCarty said some of the recent improvements at ECU will give him some added ammunition to carry on the recruiting trail this winter.

“People look at facilities, and it’s more a part of the culture now than it ever used to be,” McCarty said. “When you can say ‘we have the best locker room in Division II’ or ‘we have the biggest weight training facility in Division II’, people are going to notice.”

McCarty’s 2009 team made huge strides on both sides of the ball late in the season, and three of the Tigers’ final four losses — to North champ Texas A&M-Commerce (31-28), Southwestern (14-13) and Southeastern were by a total of five points. Already well into his first full ECU recruiting season since 2005, McCarty said he had a fairly broad wish list as he began to evaluate and talk to high school players.

“Ultimately we want guys who understand team football and how to win games,” McCarty explained. “I don’t want to say we have holes to fill, but we have positions where we don’t have a lot of depth. We need some help at running back, we have to make sure our quarterback situation changes, and we just have to have general depth at all the positions.”

ECU has recorded just three winning football seasons (and never more than six victories in a single year) since claiming the NAIA national championship in 1993 and has won a total of 10 games in the five seasons since McCarty’s first ECU squad finished a surprising 6-4 in 2004. McCarty and DeAngelis both dismissed the notion that ECU can’t compete in Division II, however, despite the fact that the Tigers are the only current member of the LSC North to have never won a division title.

“Can we win in Division II? There’s no question in my mind we can win here, or I wouldn’t be here,” McCarty said. “We’re in a community that loves football and a conference that loves football, and I guarantee you our administration wants us to win football games. Having some continuity in the program is going to help change that trend.”

“I think it’s definitely possible,” DeAngelis said. “We’ve got the right coach, and that’s half the battle. There’s no doubt that right now the Texas schools are ahead of the Oklahoma schools. We compete in other sports, but football is different. In football, you have to do a lot of different things, and we’re starting to do some of those things.”

DeAngelis, who replaced longtime ECU athletic director Dr. Tim Green, said Tiger athletics has an ace in the hole in first-year President John Hargrave.

“He’s fantastic,” DeAngelis said of Hargrave, who took over for Dr. Richard Rafes last summer. “He’s been very supportive, he really likes what we’re doing, and he’s really going to help us. Athletics is a priority to him, and that’s important.

“He and Dr. Rafes both approached (athletics) strongly, but President Hargrave just has a different approach to how he wants things to happen,” he added. “He will ask what we need to do, and for the most part he will go along with my suggestion.”

McCarty’s 2009 Tigers dug themselves an early hole playing a brutal schedule in August and September that included games with Nebraska-Omaha, Kingsville and Tarleton and an October visit to Norris Field from Abilene Christian. The same thing could happen next fall, when the Tigers will play three of the top teams in the LSC South — West Texas, Kingsville and Abilene — back-to-back-to-back in September, with the WTSU and ACU games on the road.

At this point, McCarty only has 10 games scheduled, but he said he wants to add an 11th — against an opponent to be determined once the conference decides whether the 2010 season for LSC members will begin in late August (as it has the past few years) or on the first Saturday in September.

“I like our home schedule for next year,” McCarty said. “We’ll play Incarnate Word, Eastern New Mexico, Southwestern and NSU at home. I have 10 on the schedule right now, and I’m looking for an 11th.

“We’re waiting to find out when our official starting date is,” he added. “The earliest day we can play right now is Aug. 28; right now, we’re at West Texas on Sept. 5 (to open the season).”

McCarty said there is a “scary” similarity between his current position and the one he was in back in 1999, when he took over the football program at Tabor College in Kansas. He had just 14 players when he took the job, and his first team there didn’t win a game, but within two years Tabor was 6-4 and contending for a conference title.

McCarty said he's looking for progress rather than sympathy heading into the new year, adding he has a two-part plan for improving ECU’s football fortunes.

“There won’t be any ‘woe is me’ coming out of the East Central camp,” he said. “There are two things that have to happen: No. 1, our winter and spring phases have to be fabulous, and No. 2, we have to have a great recruiting year, and my expectations are that we will.

“We have some great recruiters on staff, and we have some great things to sell at this university,” McCarty added. “We just have to bring the right kids to Ada, and if we do that we will take a step forward.”