Search the Community

Read more: http://www.goblueraiders.com/content.cfm/id/77773 Good Morning Blue Raider Fans! As the calendar creeps deeper into July, it provides the perfect opportunity to review our historic first season in Conference USA and to look forward to another great year of Blue Raider sports. I wanted to send you this letter to update you on the many things that are happening within our athletics department. Facility Renovation Update In keeping with our goal of providing the best home-field and home-court advantage in C-USA for our student-athletes, and thanks to your support, we enjoyed tremendous success at home with our football team and our men's and women's basketball teams. This past year, our football team, men's basketball team and women's basketball team combined for a 34-5 home record. This outstanding mark speaks to not only the accomplishments of our student-athletes, but also to the unwavering enthusiastic support our players enjoy every time they take the field or court by great fans such as you. To make your visits to Murphy Center even more enjoyable and to help create an even better home-court advantage, we have completely remodeled the concession stands, renovated the concourse bathrooms, and have installed new heating and air-conditioning units. You will notice the differences immediately in your first visit to Murphy Center. The center will also feature new theatre-style court lighting, which will give us the ability to enhance our pre-game introductions and in-game timeouts. Please know that fan amenities and enhancements will continue to be a priority for us. We are confident that when we finish this phase of improvements in September/October, there will be no better place to watch college basketball than the historic Murphy Center. To help increase our home-field advantage in football, our student athletes are currently enjoying a brand new, state-of-the-art, new playing surface at Floyd Stadium. This particular synthetic turf, considered the top-of-the-line playing surface manufactured by Shaw Sports Turf, extends wall-to-wall in the stadium as we eliminated the blue concrete apron surrounding the field. This creates additional playing surface space and makes our stadium even more multi-use for all of our teams to practice and train. Additionally, we have removed the center crown and leveled the playing surface giving Floyd Stadium one of the best playing surfaces in the country.

MURFREESBORO — Now that the pomp of MTSU’s official entrance into Conference USA has settled just a bit, it’s time to start capitalizing on the move. On the field, the Blue Raiders hope to repeat success similar to last season’s 8-4 record. Offseason workouts continue, and players are slated to report to preseason camp on Aug. 1. Off the field, MTSU needs to make a good first impression in the new league by selling tickets and filling up more of Floyd Stadium that previous seasons. “We want to measure ourselves more with East Carolina and Southern Miss, and (higher attendance) is under that broad conference component that we want,” MTSU athletic director Chris Massaro said. “We can get a lot better. We need to get back to averaging more than 20,000 like we did before, and I think we need to consistently get to averaging 25,000 like a Conference USA school can.” MTSU’s average attendance for home football games dipped slightly from 18,407 in 2011 to 17,738 last season. Massaro said it was not surprising that sales slipped coming off a 2-10 record in 2011. He has set a minimum goal of a 10 percent increase in season-ticket sales this year (that total number has hovered around 6,000 sold the past few seasons).That task primarily rests on The Aspire Group, an outsourced yet on-campus ticket sales and marketing firm brought in by MTSU as a new approach to building its fan base while stepping into C-USA. Read more: http://www.dnj.com/article/20130706/BLUERAIDERS01/307060028/C-USA-raises-bar-MTSU-attendance

MURFREESBORO — Conference USA has reportedly begun to make its selection of new members, and thus far MTSU has not appeared on the shopping list. Texas-San Antonio accepted an invitation in principle to CUSA on Saturday, as reported by CBSsports.com. Sun Belt Conference members Florida International and North Texas and Western Athletic Conference member Louisiana Tech are reportedly the likely three remaining suitors for CUSA’s expansion for 2013, and Charlotte could be a future fifth addition, if needed. If true, that would leave MTSU on the outside looking in for inclusion into CUSA, perceived as a better option than the Sun Belt, where the Blue Raiders have been since 2001. http://www.tennessean.com/article/D4/20120428/BLUERAIDERS01/304280053/Reports-MTSU-not-CUSA-immediate-plans?odyssey=mod%7Cnewswell%7Ctext%7CSports%7Cs