Note: Photo (above) which accompanied this story by Linfield University. Wilcatville added a numeral “1” to the photo to distinguish it from other photos (below) of the scoreboard by Wildcatville.
A D-III powerhouse is about to
build a massive new scoreboard. But why? And why NOW?
Linfield University, in Oregon,
is about to unveil a scoreboard larger than some D-1 programs. I asked their AD
why.
From Extra Points with Matt Brown, an off-the-field college
sports newsletter
Date: October 23, 2020 at 2:44:14 AM PDT
Photo Credit: Linfield University
Good morning, and thanks for your continued support of Extra
Points.
The COVID pandemic only accelerated a challenging environment
for many D-III athletic departments. As enrollment declined or slowed, many
departments looked to find more ways to save money. Some sports were cut.
Employees were furloughed. A few even looked at getting out of athletics
altogether.
But one D-III program is doing things a bit differently.
Linfield University, located in McMinnville, Oregon, isn’t downsizing. In fact,
they’re about to complete a huge new facility improvement, a 1,800 SF
video scoreboard for their football stadium. That will
easily be the largest video board in D-III. It would be one of the largest
video boards in D-II. Hell, it’ll be larger than some FBS video boards.
Athletic director Garry Killgore told me, smiling, that Linfield’s new video
board will be bigger than BYU’s.
That’s an impressive facility improvement. But why are they
doing it? And why now?
Who the heck is Linfield, anyway?
Linfield, with an enrollment of just under 2,000, plays in the
Northwest Conference with eight other small, private schools in Washington and
Oregon. The Wildcats have dominated the league on the football field, wracking
up 64 consecutive winning seasons. In 2019, they scored more than 70 points
in multiple conference games. And that
regular domination has helped make Linfield football a popular attraction.
That’s part of the appeal of the athletic department. Killgore
described the school to me as typically trying to recruit a more blue-collar
type student than some of the other private schools in the region, seeking to
serve working-class and first-generation students. Building a highly visible,
and community-connected athletic department helps with that recruitment and
retention effort.
And Linfield appears to be connected. Killgore was quick to
mention Streak Street, a
community party outside of football games, that brings in music, food trucks, and
family-oriented programming. There’s a beer garden in the
stadium, where local dignitaries are known to swing by. And the official
stadium capacity of around 2,200 seats, augmented by temporary seating, fills
up every game, leading to fans watching the action from outside.
And if fans want to follow the action from outside the stadium,
well, what better way to do that than on a big ol’ scoreboard?
How can a school with only around
2,000 students pay for something like this?
Killgore is quick to point out that the scoreboard project was
paid for entirely by private donations, with the largest coming from Jim and
Sondra Wright, longtime Linfield athletic boosters. Other local businesses
stepped in to donate in-kind contributions to make the project possible. And
the school plans to use the scoreboard for more than just football games. The
track and field program shares the stadium and will use the scoreboard, and the
school also plans to use it for freshman orientation and potential student life
programming, like movie nights.
Okay, but wouldn’t it be cheaper
to just build more stadium seating?
Killgore told me that the school does plan on expanding their
football stadium to potentially accommodate over 4,000 fans in the future. But
at the end of the day, funding this specific scoreboard project was very
important to the Wrights. The family had already made significant contributions
to other Linfield athletic facility improvements, including the school’s
soccer, lacrosse, and track.
“I think if you if you understand donor relations, and you
understand the motivations of the donor, you still have to find what they're
passionate about. And they're really super passionate about that experience,”
said Kilgore.
And while laughing, he added “Jim and Sondra, they’ll tell you
that this project is really critically important to them. They want it to do
that big scoreboard now, as they’ll tell you, is because they can't see it as
well, because they're in their 80s. And they want to see. He even laughed and
says ‘and I can’t hear it as well’, but well, our neighbors can hear it!”
It raises an interesting challenge in university administration.
It isn’t uncommon in college sports for an individual donor to become really
passionate about a specific project, maybe even a project that wasn’t
immediately in a strategic plan, and offer a lot of money just for that
project. This is exactly how some lacrosse or tennis programs get
funded in the first place. So if an important donor, somebody who has already
given a lot of money, is passionate about a very specific thing that you’d also
like to have, it’s not as if that money could be theoretically transported to
the Chemistry department instead.
Still, the optics of this particular project are not lost on
Kilgore, who admitted that the timing of the project is “strange”, and that
he’d understand why a faculty or community member might ask why the school was
pushing through this project now. He worked with the school’s administration to
make sure the entire community was aware that the scoreboard was driven by
private donations, rather than out of the general budget.
Community is hard to build
anywhere, but especially at the D-III level
Plenty of schools with much larger athletic department budgets
struggle to community engagement or a strong in-game experience. That Linfield
seems to have done that, not just by regularly winning, but by creating
something that the entire town, campus, and athletic program wants to be a part
of, is unique, especially at the D-III level.
Of course, none of that means anything if the school itself
isn’t healthy. Kilgore admitted that the scoreboard will increase power costs a
little bit. And the university itself wasn’t completely spared from the
enrollment and financial challenges that many smaller private schools face
(Kilgore told me the school reduced headcount via encouraging early
retirements). Building a great student and athlete experience is great, but if
the Nursing and English departments are struggling, it isn’t enough.
Maybe it wouldn’t be the first project the athletic department
would have picked if they were using only their own money. But now, they’ll
have another unique calling card as they build out a strength of the school.
So don’t worry if you can’t score a ticket to the next Linfield
game. I hear it’s about to be a little easier to watch from afar.
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