Brett reached out to me last week to get my take on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Apogee Stadium.
While I will not go into a lot of the details of the story he is publishing, I will echo some of my thoughts here. If you want to read the whole story, sign up for Brett's newsletter.
I spoke about the student vote, and how the credit for the students voting in favor of the new athletic fee should go to several people. While I had a role in drafting the bill in the Student Senate, others such as Jeff Kline and Blake Windham deserve just as much credit, if not more. They were the younger guys, they had more facetime with students, and they did a lot of work. I spoke to some student groups, I wrote opinion pieces for the NT Daily, I created the Facebook group Students for a New Stadium that had over 2,000 members, and I purchased campaign signs and planted them around the campus perimeter.
But the real credit goes to the students who showed up to vote. They made an informed decision in the face of stiff opposition from some very vocal student groups.
I also talked about how far we've come. While the product on the field over the last 10 years has been hit or miss, the progress has met our expectations. We got out of the Sun Belt, attendance improved, recruiting is better, donations increased, and we got some bowl games. We also have a new soccer stadium/track facility, and a great football practice facility.
There's more in Brett's newsletter. But I just wanted to drop in and say that I'm proud of what we did. I don't know what is going to happen in college football over the next 5 years, but we put ourselves in a much better position.
Go Mean Green!