Shelly Vitanza:
Welcome to the LU Moment. Thank you for listening. I’m Shelly Vitanza, the Director of Public Affairs at Lamar University. Each week, we showcase the great events, activities, programs, projects, and people at Lamar University. Happy Valentine’s Day! I hope you are having a lovely day! I thought we would start this broadcast off with things that I love about Lamar University. One of my favorite things I'd the three-hundred-acre campus and the centrally located quad. It is completely tree-covered, and we have some beautiful art in the area, and I love our quad and the campus in general. I love walking across the campus. I love the rocking chairs on the second floor of the Setzer Center where you can sit and observe the campus and the math lab on the second floor of the Lucas building where students can get free tutoring from 8am to 5pm for all math students. I love the Starbucks in the bottom of the library and the Plummer building, so round and historic, one of the first buildings on the campus. I love the walkway across MLK. I know the students don’t like the walkway, because they’ve got to park at the Montagne and walk across, but I just love these walkways. I like to take my kids across the walkways. I love our Big Red, our mascot. I love the Peckers. You may not know who the Peckers are, but these are students who have declared themselves the biggest fans. They come to all the sporting events, they act wild and crazy and they have the most fun. They usually paint their chests, and they are just fun. I love the faculty to student ratio: 19 to 1 and the diversity of our campus. We have students from 17 countries and 48 states. I also love the fact that we are an up-and-coming Hispanic Distinguished University which is exciting. Our students are incredible. Many of them, in fact, 60%, are first generation students coming from families who have never attended college. I love the fact that during a global pandemic, we still graduated 5,000 students in 2020. That’s huge. I love our resiliency. While the rest of the world in higher education was dealing with the global pandemic, Lamar University was not only dealing with the global pandemic, but we overcame two hurricanes and a plant explosion. No other university in the world overcame as much as Lamar University did in 2020. That’s pretty remarkable. I could go on and on and on. Lamar is an exceptional place. I’m glad to work here. In fact, we’ve got another thing that I think we are all going to love, the area will love and it’s going to be good for Lamar. In July, Lamar University will move to the WAC. The Western Athletic Conference and here to talk about this and LU sports in general is Marco Born. He is LU’s athletic director. Marco, how are you?
Marco Born:
Good. Thanks for having me!
Shelly Vitanza:
Yeah! Glad you’re here! I want to get to the really important stuff first. Are you the tallest athletic director in college?
Marco Born:
I might be up there. There’s some tall individuals in the college athletics, but I might be up there. One of the tallest maybe.
Shelly Vitanza:
I just want people to know how tall you are. How tall are you?
Marco Born:
Six-foot-nine.
Shelly Vitanza:
Six-foot-nine. I need to let people know that you did not play basketball because that’s always the first question: “You played basketball, right?”
Marco Born:
That’s the icebreaker. I did not. I played college tennis. I was a college tennis player at Middle Tennessee State back in the day.
Shelly Vitanza:
You’ve been at Lamar for how long now?
Marco Born:
Almost three years. In April, it will be my three-year anniversary and it feels like ten especially going through COVID-19 through the last 10-12 months, but that’s been three years. It’s flown by, it’s been great.
Shelly Vitanza:
2020 felt like we lived five years in that one year. So, I want you to think about some of the things you love about Lamar University during this interview, but let’s summarize this past year with things that athletics have had to overcome. Can you tell us what some of the biggest obstacles have been? Maybe things that people wouldn’t think about.
Marco Born:
Back in March, March 12th will be in the memory books, so to speak. That’s when everything shut down. We were in Katy for a basketball tournament and our men’s basketball team was getting ready to play that afternoon in the first game of the Southern Conference Tournament. The conference decided to cancel the tournament and the very next day the NCAA cancelled the basketball tournament. So, that’s when everything sort of unraveled for us. We had a staff meeting the next morning and that may have been the last time we met in person. Actually, it’s been the last time I met in person with the head coaches of the group. We sent everybody home. That’s been the last 10-12 months of COVID-19. The hardest part has been trying to engage our student athletes and keeping them engaged especially when they had to be at home as we all were for a couple months. Going through all the testing protocols and everything we’ve been through, it’s been pretty interesting, we’ve learned a lot. I feel like I have a Ph.D. in PCR and antigen testing now, but we’ve learned a lot about ourselves. We are just happy and proud that we keep ours student athletes safe and we are playing all of our sports here this spring. This weekend here, Valentines weekend, we start off softball is playing
now, soccer is playing, and football will kick off next weekend and finish-up basketball season. A lot is going on in athletics and I’m really proud of our staff and students.
Shelly Vitanza:
Yeah. It feels like you’ve kind of seen the worst of it and it’s been amazing how you’ve contested your athletes and you engaged. I thought about so often through this, how exciting it is to play college sports and then to be told you are postponing or delaying. Marco, everyone is going to have season, right? And volleyball is going to play, correct?
Marco Born:
Yeah, correct. The fall sports which for us are cross-country, volleyball, soccer, and football. They were all postponed in the Fall, but we are playing them here in the Spring. Cross-country is actually going to be competing in the Southland Conference Championships the next week. Volleyball is already playing, soccer is kicking off this weekend and football, so everybody gets to play. There’s a lot of opportunities for our fans to come and watch games. We have up to three of four events a day on the weekend. If you get bored, come on out to our facilities and enjoy the games. It’ll be different with limited attendance and social distancing, but we are committed to the experience for everybody and I can’t wait to make it through the Spring. It’s going to be a lot of fun.
Shelly Vitanza:
Well, it will be kind of historic. It will be our last time playing the Southland Conference. In July, we switch over to the WAC. With so much going on, why move to the WAC at this time? What’s important about being a member of the WAC?
Marco Born:
Sure. I can go back three years when I first met Dr. Evans and talked to him in my interview. We talked about. How do we prepare ourselves as an institution, not just as an athletic department to be part of a league that’s committed to division 1 athletics? That’s forward thinking. Like you mentioned, we’re growing, we’re very resilient, we are in a growing area. We’re close to Houston with a great medium market. We’ve always been keeping our eyes and ears open, so to speak. Quite frankly, COVID-19 has accelerated some of those conversations. Early on, we had some conversations with some other institutions that are joining us in the WAC out of the southland which is Stephen F. Austin, Sam Houston State and Abilene Christian and we just had the opportunity to join the conference. The WAC has a terrific brand. I think a lot of people, pretty much everybody I talk to, they remember the WAC from back in the 2010-2011 when Boise State won the Fiesta Bowl against Oklahoma when they still had football at the time. So, they have a terrific brand in not just football, but basketball and other sports and they didn’t have football the last eight to ten years and so this gives them an opportunity with us to bring football back and we will be part of a very like-minded group of institutions. The institutions are growing in student bodies, they have growing economies, growing local communities, and growing state populations when you look at the state of Texas, Utah, and Arizona, three that are located in the WAC. Those three are probably one, two, and three when it comes to growing states. Everybody seems to be moving to Texas, and Utah and Arizona’s got some
beautiful places. At the same time, all the institutions are growing. It was just sort of a no-brainer. There were some non-negotiable sports. I think we all wanted to go together and Utah joining us. All of us going to together just made sense. We would not have made this move on our own. We felt like moving with those institutions and now having six institutions in the state of Texas: the four us, Tarleton State, and UTRGB in our division. We are the conference with the most schools in the state of Texas in the entire country. We have more institutions in Texas then the Big 12 and some other institutions. We are proud, we are excited for our student athletes. They get to see some different places, they get to travel to some states they’ve probably never been to, so that’s an opportunity for them to expand their horizons so to speak. I talked to the faculty center and the SGA and I told them, “We are part of a different peer group with growing institutions. I think your degree from Lamar is going to be even more valuable than it was before now with the association of the WAC. You look at institutions like Grand Canyon with 100,000 students in Phoenix. It’s one of the fastest growing institutions in the country. A lot of positives, a lot of upsides. I honestly have not had a negative conversation about it with anybody. Everybody is excited. Our fans are excited. Our basketball tournament is going to be in Vegas, so everybody will get to go to Vegas every March. It’s usually during Spring break. I already told the SGA leadership, “You guys need to plan to sponsor a trip to Vegas rather than going to Katy. That’s kind of why we made the move, and I couldn’t be happier, and Dr. Evans has been so supportive of it. I can’t thank him enough to be part of that process. It’s a presidential decision. It’s not just an athletic director’s decision, it’s something that the University makes as a move and so we are just pumped up to join the Summer of 2021.
Shelly Vitanza:
It’s exciting for Lamar University to expand its brand further into the United States and I agree that it’s great for our athletes as well. Marco, really quick, I want to understand that there’s divisions within the WAC. So, we will not play every team in the WAC, just those in our division until the championships come along. Explain to a non-sports kind of person.
Marco Born:
Sure. That was a non-negotiable force. When you look at the map of the WAC, now you think, there’s a school up in Seattle Washington. Are we going to send all of our teams up there every year? We won’t. We will be part of what’s called the Southwest division, I call the Texas, division, again the six institutions I mentioned earlier. All of our sports that play regular season competitions, volleyball, soccer, baseball, and softball will only compete in that division that will play those opponents twice a year. Once we get to the conference tournament, we will then compete against the other divisions. The other sports: track and field, cross country, tennis, golf, they don’t play in the regular season competitions. So, they will create their own schedules more regionally, which they used to anyway. Basketball will play within the division, but they will cross over to the other division a couple times a year which we’re fine with because basketball does have quite a bit or revenue attached to it with stuff like tournaments and ticket sales and everything else that comes with it. I felt like it’s justified to do that. Then football, I didn’t touch on that too much earlier. Not everyone in the WAC is playing football. Five out of the six institutions in Texas, again the four of us from the Southland and Tarleton are playing football already. Dixie State and Southern Utah are playing football and then UTRGB is
going to add football in two years. So, we will play everybody in that. Again, football does have some revenue attached to it, so we are budgeting for two charter trips a year is something we can work towards and we feel like it makes sense. I do think there’s lots of revenue opportunities for us when you look at the basketball leagues. And really quickly, basketball, the Southland is ranked 30 out of 32 in the country in the basketball league when it comes to rankings. The WAC is ranked 15 out of 32. Our seat in the tournament is going to be much higher. I think there’s an opportunity to get more than one team which all relays into more revenue distribution to all of us at the end. That’s a lot of detail. That’s a lot of athletic talk there for you. Just overall, a lot of opportunities, but we will stay in the state of Texas for the majority of our sports of travel. And they will get to travel to get to travel to the other side a little bit for the championships.
Shelly Vitanza:
Perfect. Thank you for that explanation. That does help. 30 seconds, Marco. Tell us about the Bud Leonard athletic fund and how that came about. 30 seconds.
Marco Born:
Yeah absolutely. We are excited. We felt like with the move to the WAC and just in general, I felt like we needed to rebrand our fundraising with the athletic department to the Bud Leonard Athletic Fund. Bud Leonard was such a great supporter of athletics and I got to know him early on. We lost him, he passed away here in the Fall. He’s been a great supporter of athletics. He was one of the founders of the Cardinal Club which was one of the previous fundraising arm and the Hall of Honor. We just felt like it was the right thing to honor him with this. I think a lot of people will recognize him and empower that. We need our fans to step up and support the Bud Leonard Athletics Fund. Moving forward, I think it’s the best resource that we have to support our student athletes and to be able to grow what we can do for our student athletes and coaches. We’re excited about that. He’s been terrific. People really are excited for a rebrand and it was well overdue to be honest with you. We’re just excited about it and can’t wait for people to join to Bud Leonard Fund Moving Forward.
Shelly Vitanza:
Perfect. Alright Marco, thank you so much. Love having you on this Valentines Day and appreciate everybody out there listening. I am Shelly Vitanza, the Director of Public Affairs, encouraging you to go to lamarcardinals.com check out our Lamar sports and support them. Thanks for listening. See you next week.