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Post by pantherwalleye on May 19, 2015 18:57:29 GMT -6
That's what I was trying to do!
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Post by PantherU on May 20, 2015 14:24:05 GMT -6
So let's talk basketball. This practice facility is all about the long term health of our program, and by extension its ability as the marketing arm of the university to assist in recruiting and retaining new students. It's paid for by students and donations, and in the long run costs taxpayers nothing as the money will be repaid in full by that segregated fee (and the donations).
As far as the building itself goes, its benefits should be obvious. The players and coaches are no longer tied to the constraints of the Klotsche Center's building hours. During the semester, the Klotsche is open 6 am to 11 pm during the week and the hours are shorter on the weekends: Friday and Saturday it closes at eight, Saturday and Sunday it opens at 10 am. These hours are restricted even further during the summer, when few students are on campus. The hours of the Klotsche Center are built around the general student population's need, not the needs of the Division I athletics program.
I've gotten questions from players in the past on what to do if they want to put up shots at 2 a.m. It's not as crazy as you think - I know plenty of people who find they can't sleep and decide to put in some work, and it's not a stretch to find Division I basketball players that want to do the same.
There's no limits on the court beyond the needs of the two teams that will be using it. The current Klotsche arena space is used by any number of athletics programs as well as intramural teams. Players would not be limited in any way to using the facilities. They'd be free to work out and work on their game without outside interference. This is a big deal.
What's a bigger deal is what it means for recruits. If we build this, we'd be cancelling out one of the biggest knocks on our program: that this university is not committed to basketball. It shows. Every recruit coming in here knows, because the schools we recruit against tell them: Milwaukee isn't committed to basketball. You practice in the same gym the students play dodgeball in.
We get that practice facility built, we've done one enormous thing and one other thing that's also big: buying the naming rights to the arena, along with the renovations to the building, show recruits we plan on being big time. But the practice facility will be comparable to the new one at Creighton. What does that mean? It means we can easily sell our new practice facility as a high-major practice facility. It's a Big East level practice facility. The Al McGuire Center cost $42 million, but at least $25 million of that cost was due to the arena attached to it. This is just...enormous for the program - to say we've cut out the practice facility difference between us and Marquette, a perennial top 35 program.
Recruits use a lot of things to decide where to play. The coaching staff is oftentimes the first thing they bring up when they're talking about why they picked a place. Whether or not You Believe in Jeter or you're a holdout Pearl Dead-ender, our time with Rob Jeter as head coach is more likely than not in its final two years, for better or for worse. Moving past the coach and the roster (since it is fluid), more often than not a recruit's things they care about are based on where they are in their academic career. Essentially, it's whether they are a JUCO recruit or a high school recruit.
Junior college players just spent one or two years at a junior college, which is 9.5 times out of 10 in the middle of nowhere. They want to go where they're going to have fun and enjoy the last two or three years of college, and that's why we can recruit JUCO players against Big Ten, Big XII and SEC teams. Milwaukee is one of the most fun places in the country to spend the ages of 20-23, so a kid like Jordan Aaron is going to look at Creighton, Maryland and Milwaukee as Omaha, College Park and Milwaukee. We've got a big, diverse population and it's not too expensive. The East Side is an eclectic, cultured neighborhood with 16,000 college students, more than half of them girls. There's bar districts up the wazzoo and if you want to get out of the city, Chicago is a short drive. The City of Festivals sounds a lot better than Omaha when you just spent two years in Ottumwa, Iowa.
High school players, on the other hand, care a great deal about facilities. They're coming into this thinking the roster isn't as important as the recruiting class coming in with them, so where am I going to spend the next four years of my life? So the practice facility, the dorms, and the arena are what's important to them.
There are other things that are important to recruits. Conference, academic programs, distance from home, all these are things they take into consideration. But almost none of them cite them as reasons for picking a certain school (except occasionally distance).
Every kid in Wisconsin who gets recruited by the Panthers has 15 people in their ear saying UWM doesn't care about its basketball program. A practice facility is real, tangible evidence that oh yeah, we care big time. Why was last year so bad for Wright State? Before their NCAA Tournament in 2007, they had been a bottom feeder for well over a decade. It was bad because in the time after that NCAA Tournament, they built the Setzer Pavilion for $9 million and have been a perennial top-4 HL team since then. Now most of us think Wright State is just a tough out no matter what year it is.
Facilities are our Achilles Heel right now. We have taken care of it partly by getting into the Panther Arena. Once the renovations are done, that's a high-major arena. Marquette and Wisconsin may have better buildings (MU certainly will if the Bucks get their new arena), but those two programs have top 25 arenas.
This practice facility stands at $13 million, same as Creighton's building. Except their building has all the bells and whistles in it. Jenny Gryniewicz is raising money to fill it out and make it super cool, so by the time it's a finished building it could be even more bang for our buck. I believe we could become a perennial top 75 program, maybe a top 50 program if we get this building done.
Add in my idea to convert the now-rarely used Alumni House into a dorm for 16 men's basketball players and 17 general students (gotta be over 50% non-athletes) and we could bump our way to top-30, where a Final Four isn't so far fetched as it is for us now.
So let me ask this question again: if the building is going to happen anyways, and a drop in the bucket on the state budget would help us have shovels in the ground this summer and save us money down the road (and cost taxpayers a zero-sum down the road), why are we waiting at all?
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Post by 73withharoldlee on May 22, 2015 8:21:10 GMT -6
Well said, I feel we as Panther People need to speak about these issues. We are waiting because someone is doing all that he can to privatize Public Education and further his career goals, as lofty as they are. In the end UWM needs to remain open, affordable, enjoyable, an economic engine, a learning place, for all. A capital budget should not be available only to the Marquettes of the world in the form of endowments and donations from the rich. They have their agenda and nothing is wrong with that. I am tired of waiting. I have filed stae tax returns for 50 years and really haven't complained about the amount. I don't dump toxic waste in my trash container. I catch and release. I drive the speed limit. I teach immigrant how to read English. I am a proud graduate of UWM. I want to enjoy life and fresh air. And, I want my favorite basketball program to have a practice facility. These may be my last words on this site.
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