Bigger stage: UNCG’s hoop dream defies tall odds
This week's column.
It comes as no surprise that UNCG would at some point replace tiny Fleming Gym as its home basketball court with the Greensboro Coliseum.
New Chancellor Linda Brady has made no secret of her desire to partner with the coliseum as a means to elevate the profile of the Spartan hoops program.
It is surprising that the Triad’s largest university plans to do it so soon. As in next season.
So far as school and coliseum officials are concerned, the future is right now.
The plan’s selling points are obvious: The coliseum desperately needs an anchor tenant. It has lacked one since pro hockey went belly up here. Brady, who readily admits to being a sports fan, wants a big-time basketball program at UNCG. And not just for the fun of it.
If UNCG can schedule even one or two big-name schools in the coliseum, that probably will boost recruiting. Better players mean more victories and a shot at the NCAA tournament.
Athletics in turn can help market the up-and-coming institution and help it shed its “commuter school” label.
And basketball is a much more practical — and less expensive — means to do that than, say, UNC-Charlotte’s ambitions to build a football team, from the turf up.
As UNCG’s footprint inevitably creeps toward Lee Street and High Point Road, the coliseum makes sense as a home arena.
But this won’t be easy. The team has averaged only 1,118 fans per game at Fleming Gym over the past six seasons, 1,394 last season (by comparison, the city’s other Division 1 school, N.C. A&T, averaged 3,245 fans in 2007-08).
Even curtained off to a 7,613-seat capacity, the coliseum is a big place. UNCG might do very well if and when it can schedule ACC teams there — especially Duke and Carolina. But the rest of the schedule could be a struggle. And nothing sucks the atmosphere out of a game as effectively as a teeny crowd in a humongous arena.
Then there is the city’s spotty record, at best, as a spectator sports town. Despite the presence of a first-rate facility in the coliseum, minor-league teams come and go so fast it’s hard to remember their names.
While it is true that the Grasshoppers have drawn record crowds, baseball is a different animal. Most fans come for the atmosphere and the fresh air, not the games.
That said, you’ve got to admire UNCG’s ambition. And you have to remember the long list of long shots that, by all rights, shouldn’t have succeeded here, but did anyway.
I’m reminded of a pair of young newcomers named Richard Whittington and Preston Lane, who announced plans several years ago to create a regional professional theater downtown. Even as Whittington, the theater’s managing director, showed me around the empty shell of the old Montgomery Ward department store that would become Triad Stage, I smiled politely, even as I thought to myself: “It’ll never work.”
As he drew pictures in his mind of a stage surrounded by seats on three sides, all I heard were the echoes of his voice. And all I could see was a blank page.
There would be a skywalk to the city parking garage in the rear, Whittington said. “Yeah right,” I thought, considering all of the other theater groups in the city and the ongoing struggles of art groups in general to stay afloat.
“I can remember the look on your face,” Whittington said last week. “You were not alone.”
That tour came to mind as I found my seat for another sold-out performance of “Beautiful Star” in the main theater or as I squeezed into an equally sold-out presentation of “Dracula” in the upstairs “cabaret” space.
That doesn’t mean Triad Stage is flush with cash. It still must use fundraising to cover deficits. But its impact on downtown has been indelible.
As for other examples of cockeyed ideas that never would work here, where to begin?
The downtown ballpark that defies national norms by drawing big crowds long after its novelty wore off.
The invention of Vick’s Vapo Rub and Cough Drops in a South Elm Street drugstore, which begat the Richardson family fortune, which begat the Center for Creative Leadership, an international finishing school for leaders that has offices in Belgium, California, Colorado — and off U.S. 220 in northwest Greensboro.
Joe and Eunice Dudley’s ascension from mom-and-pop business to beauty and cosmetics magnates.
By comparison, UNCG’s ambitions in the coliseum seem positively modest.
The odds are long, but so what? Even if the venture should fail, it would have been well worth the try.
You can’t score if you don’t shoot.
Comments (1)
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I think you hit this one spot-on. Another main problem is that UNCG is a commuter campus and will become more so as enrollment expands--general admin has some huge numbers--without dorms, which already house only a fraction of the students. But it doesn't hurt to try, and the payoff would be huge if UNCG basketball could become a sports anchor for the school and the city.
Posted on December 14, 2008 9:40 PM