I’m not certain why I feel as though I should help you understand why most don’t hold the same disdain for the present state of the football program and your subsequent frustration Monroe, perhaps because I believe it must mean a lot to you. So allow me to tell you my personal story of connection with OHIO, and how it has changed over the last decade.
I was marginally associated with OHIO after graduation. I’m from Lancaster, so it has always been easy for me to find reasons to spend a little time in Athens year over year despite living around the country. I gave my first gift to OHIO, albeit modest, the year after I graduated, and havd given modestly year over year since graduation. I have never intentionally missed a year of giving. But with that, I was never ENGAGED with OHIO. I didn’t maintain relationships with faculty and staff, didn’t have connections with other alumni in any significant way, I was truly appreciating Athens from afar. I had always held the opinion that OHIO was a nice, little regional university of which I was proud to attend. I wore the gear, I waxed poetically about bygone times and was always supportive of alma mater, but I never gave back in a meaningful way in “time” nor “talent”.
I was a student athlete at OHIO, but was by no means a success or integral to my team. I RARELY missed a basketball game while in school, and only attended one half of an OHIO football game while at OHIO, and as was tradition left after the 110 performance, missing the come from behind victory against Marshall that was the only victory of the team that season, and one of seven victories during my time on campus. After graduation, I always followed OHIO athletics on the crawl, but only attended a handful of OHIO games in person in the seventeen years after I graduated, those that were regionally convenient. I gave a couple of minor gifts to OHIO athletics after the Victory with Honor campaign was launched, primarily because I felt the mantra was aspirational, and conveyed the way I felt OHIO should pursue its participation in intercollegiate athletics…With Honor.
My entire engagement with OHIO changed the night of September 9th, 2005. I flew up from Tampa to take in this game, which in my mind was seemingly impossible for my alma mater to schedule: an ESPN network broadcast in prime time against a Big East opponent. I wanted to see this new coach in person, a former Big Eight coach. It was inconceivable to me that my proud little regional university could actually have the chutzpah to hire someone who had been a head football coach at such a nationally prominent football powerhouse. And then this happened…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN4qpzZ3XEY . I had never attended a game in Peden from start to finish…ever. The team went 4-7. I couldn’t care less if they finished with a losing record that season, and the reason for my indifference on the record: We were now on the national radar. It took balls to make that hire. It took balls to spend the money in an attempt to change the paradigm for OHIO football weekends.
Football is important in the state of Ohio. Every fall Saturday, residents in Ohio have turned to the occupants of the Horseshoe to entertain themselves, and for several decades the leadership in Cutler Hall was more than happy to treat the ICA’s anchor fall sport as an afterthought. They allowed OUr alumni’s interest and disposable income to matriculate to the banks of the Scioto without concern for the long term detrimental impact on OHIO alumni engagement for several decades. This was happening at the very time that the state share of instruction was being reduced, and at the very time that the University could have most benefited from a strong level of engagement with its potential donors. The opportunity for three months each fall to engage your alumni, to bring them back to campus, to foster long term affinity and sow it into donations to build an endowment, completely wasted. Cutler Hall totally whiffed for over two generations.
With the Solich hire, I felt OHIO was sending a holistic message that the institution was now ready to compete on a National scale. And there was now a guy in Cutler Hall in Rod McDavis that, love him or hate him, took on a personal mission to see OHIO transition from a regional institution to a national one. My interests were piqued, and an increase in engagement soon followed. All of the sudden, I wanted to be a part of what was going on in Athens, both athletically and academically. I wanted to be part of the mission in a more tangible and meaningful way.
I really knew very little about our ICA programs, and suddenly I found myself traveling to road games FOR FOOTBALL, a sport that I only supported for about two hours one Saturday in the 1980’s. I experienced the program going from being a complete non-entity to suddenly being covered by national media, not only because of the notoriety of the coach, but also because the results on the field improved. . All the while I was gaining more of an appreciation for the fact that OHIO had never committed a major NCAA violation, and we were really taking our contract with student athletes seriously that we wanted them to come out of college with a degree, and as transformed people. We were competing in a fashion in which I could feel pride. I then became an annual donor to the Bobcat Club and a season ticket holder for football and basketball. I made donations to facility improvement projects and brand new facilities. I had never attended Homecoming in Athens in my life, and evolved to rarely missing it. I attended NCAA tournament games in Providence and Nashville, and I made a planned estate gift to OHIO athletics. These things from a guy who was passively engaged for seventeen years.
Beyond OHIO athletics, I had never attended an alumni event in seventeen years of being an alumnus, and within four years of my reengagement in 2005, I was heading an alumni chapter which was winning national awards for organization and programming. I was attending the Alumni Leaders Conference, during which I was learning more about the academic mission of the University and its desire to increase its national prominence and grown its endowment to achieve greater financial independence. I was nominated for and elected to serve on the Alumni Association’s Board of Directors and asked to serve as Regional Chair for the Promise Lives Campaign. I hosted student forums on campus, hosted student “Dinners with 12 Strangers”, I worked college fairs and housed OHIO students who were on summer internships. And I made a planned estate gift to OHIO to establish an Appalachian Scholarship, and recently helped the Massachusetts Chapter endow a scholarship to benefit a student attending OHIO from New England.
So why am I making such a short story long as it relates to Coach? Because without all the context, the conclusion carries far less gravitas. I am certain most of Coach’s supporter’s stories vary from mine, but that night in 2005 literally changed my life. I have gotten to know some really great people over the last twelve years of re-engagement with OHIO. Dawn Werry, Drew Ossakow, Jim Harris, Rob Norris, Chuck Williams, Pete Chouteau, Ben Shoemaker, Ted Thompson, Tom Freeman, Jeffrey Drozek Fitzwater, Alex Norris, Aaron Stone, Aaron Gary, Terry Lee, Harry White, Tim Merrifield, Kenny Kerr, Lou Horvath, Russ Eisenstein, Rob Cornelius, Evan Shaw, Matt Morton, Jim Schaus, Rod McDavis…AND Frank Solich (for brevity I am leaving out a host of others who shouldn’t feel slighted): all people I really like and have made an impact on my life, and likely none of whom I would have met had Frank not taken the position as head coach. However, beyond the serendipitous nature of Frank and OHIO’s aligning at just the right time to allow me to meet those people, in my humble opinion, Frank has done a phenomenal job at OHIO. And in my humble opinion, the measure of his success is far broader than winning a Mid-American Conference Football Championship game.
To be quite “frank”, my measure for success of the football program has very little to do with winning championships when you consider from where the program has come since 1968. The program is, and continues to be considered nationally relevant. It is indeed now a PROGRAM, not just a team. The program means far more to me than titles. As it relates to the 2015’s season, I felt that the season was both a success, as well as disappointing on some levels. SPOILER ALERT: so does the team! Have we had a few real clunkers over the last two season’s…SURE! But I was more upset about the state of the program when we were having the locker room issues that we were in 2013 than I have been the last two years, when the culture is solid but we are just missing a couple of puzzle pieces to allow us to achieve at a high level. Now if we were experiencing repeated 4-7 seasons such as the one in 2005 and there was clear and absolute turmoil within the program of which I was not proud, I am certain I would be expressing an entirely different sentiment.
We would likely not have the benefit of watching OHIO on ESPN broadcast television as much as we do if Frank was not our coach. The facilities that are in place right now, and those in the works, likely would not have been planned and built without his influence. Homecoming is a much larger event weekend than it was in the decades prior to Frank being our head coach. Attendance and season ticket sales have gone from being a complete non-factors to being MAC leading enterprises. Alumni engagement is up significantly over the last decade, as well as the level of donations, and to some extent that can be attributed to what has happed over twelve, or thirteen, or fourteen weeks each fall over the last decade. But the fact that I didn’t get to see the team carry a trophy to the locker room in Ford Field by no means diminishes the achievements made during the season and over Frank’s tenure, and the profound impact the last decade has had on my life. We’ll win a title, but there are far bigger fish to fry. That is of course, in my humble opinion.
And in full disclosure, my wife and I donated a locker in Frank’s name during the football locker room renovation project as a thank you to all he has done for us, and for OHIO Football.