When Charlie Weatherbie arrived as Utah State's new football coach in December 1991, it was in the prime of recruiting season. Through January and into February, he assembled both a staff and a freshman class for his new football team, bringing prospects to campus and showing them around.
"I can remember some people looking at our locker room," Weatherbie says. "We didn't want to take them through it. There were better high school locker rooms."Last summer, Weatherbie and staff, with donated material, refurbished the locker room to where it's as nice as any. During August 1992 two-a-days, players spoke lovingly of what the coaches had done for them and how proud that new locker room made them feel.
"Now, it's one of the first places we take them," Weatherbie says of players the Aggies are recruiting. He's certain such aesthetics can help players decide in favor of Utah State. "If you had to stay in a Motel 6 or a Hyatt Regency and were paying the same price, where would you stay?" he asks.
Utah State President George Emert and athletic director Chuck Bell are trying to use the same principle on a much broader scale to give Aggie athletics and, in turn, they hope, the whole school an enhanced national reputation.
According to the athletic director, when Emert was hired by USU some 15 months ago, and when he hired Bell in December, they were given mandates "to raise the visibility of Utah State University.
"Athletics," says Bell, "can give that visibility quicker than anything else. Athletics in most institutions is the window to the world for that university."
USU wants desperately to be a VIP.
Thus, Emert and Bell have tackled an ambitious USU self-improvement program that - if accomplished, and right now that's a big if because it will be done by private donation or not at all - will make the school more attractive to high-profile recruits in all sports. Those athletes, reasons Bell, could make the Aggies consistent winners who would command national attention and respect.
In this grand dream, Emert and Bell imagine grand opponents queueing up to play the Aggies. Some of them might even invite the Aggies to play in a prestigious conference filled with opponents with whom they feel compatible academically and geographically - the BYUs, Utahs, Wyomings and Colorado States of the Mountain world.
Emert and Bell imagine how this respect would benefit all of Utah State University, from agriculture to athletics to Space Lab and beyond. "People evaluate athletic programs and universities by association," says Bell. "The number of research grants we get is on a par with, if not better than, Colorado State, but Utah State is not viewed in the same light as Air Force Academy, Colorado State or Wyoming."
If these two have their way, that will change.
In the Emert/Bell vision, Utah State eventually emulates Stanford University, the school with a double major in academics and athletics and straight A's in both.
So far, the only part of this home-improvement project that is certain to be completed is the new state-of-the-art football lighting system now being installed at Romney Stadium for use beginning with the Baylor game Sept. 11. The donated lights are said to be 35 percent brighter than those at BYU's Cougar Stadium. They give the Aggies the capability to be televised. Television means money and exposure.
Big West Conference Commissioner Dennis Farrell says lights could also uniquely benefit Utah State because people who now miss games because they're out hunting might be home in time for night games.
USU's official drift on the rest of the dream project is: "As the program grows and justifies them, the following improvements may be made."
On the USU wish list but as yet unfunded by private donations are:
- An additional 10,000 seats to make Romney Stadium a 40,000-seat facility, bigger than current stadiums at Colorado State, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming or any Big West Consortium stadium and on a par with Fresno State. Seats would be added in the corners and on the north side above the current locker room building. This, even though the 30,000-seat Romney Stadium has never been filled for an Aggie game.
- Luxury boxes and enclosed VIP seating at Romney to generate higher income from games.
- Elevators to luxury boxes and media areas.
- A five-story building complex at the south end of Romney Stadium, above current end zone seating. The proposed building would provide impressive areas for academic support including tutoring and computering, weight/strength/flexibility training, injury rehabilitation, football offices, recruiting, fund raising, entertaining, a sports novelty items store and ticket offices.
- Conversion of the current locker room to visitors' facilities and to the use of women's softball and men's and women's track and field teams.
Bell won't divulge the expected cost of the projects, saying delicate negotiations with prospective donors could be jeopardized. A good starting- point guess might be $15 million.
The president and AD are sensitive to the possibility that some in the USU community may be angered by the attention to athletics, so they are tentative about public statements.
Bell will say, however, that the goal is to have things in place by the opening of the 1995 football season. "I feel very optimistic that donors will come forth to make the dream come true," he says. He adds, "It's not just a sketch on a piece of paper. We fully intend that it will happen."
Bell says the athletic makeover is good for the whole school, and higher visibility nationally would bring in top students and more research grants.
Kent Robson, USU Faculty Senate chairman, doubts that research grants would be affected much. The school now gets more than $100 million a year in such grants. Based on the number of faculty on a per-capita basis, Utah State ranks fifth or sixth nationally in the amount of grants it gets, Robson says. But much of that comes, he says, because of connections to the Russians - coordinated through the Pentagon - and the Russians have no interest in Aggie athletics.
Robson does think increased athletic visibility could help attract better students. And, he says, "A lot of people are very much interested in athletics on the academic staff."
Opposition from USU's academia, then, would be light as long as, says Robson, the cost doesn't involve state funds and is all from private sources that would not detour funds that might have gone to scholastics. The faculty would be unhappy if a donation usually earmarked for, say, the library, was given instead to the football field.
So far, says Robson, the athletic fund raising seems to be avoiding conflict with academic funds.
Bell served eight years as assistant basketball coach and assistant athletic director for University of Wyoming, helping recruit athletes to windswept, frigid Laramie. "It's immensely easier," he says, to recruit to Laramie than it is now to recruit to Logan.
Two reasons, he says: Facilities and league.
When a recruit makes the allowed 48-hour campus visit, says Bell, he or she sees mainly the academic/athletic areas. They make decisions based on that. "The first thing a kid wants to see is the weight room and academic support areas," Bell says. Academic support is becoming a big issue with athletes, who ask "how they can help me get through school?" Bell says.
"Today, there's more emphasis on schooling," concurs Wyoming athletic director Paul Roach.
The Aggies' dream building and accompanying stadium, says Weatherbie, would show recruits, "That we are concerned and care about the student athlete enough to give them the finest. The thing it's going to do is show where the program is headed."
Nobody knows yet, however, where it will lead - to an improved Big West, to the WAC or to some hybrid conference nobody can yet imagine? It is, after all, the Aggies' ultimate goal that all this improving will lead to a better neighborhood and more-fun playmates.