–Jim Jarrett
Director of Athletics

Getting the go-ahead from the Board of Visitors on June 14, Old Dominion is officially exploring the feasibility of adding football as an NCAA Division I-AA intercollegiate sport in fall 2009.

The board’s 14-0 vote comes as good news to the large majority of alumni who responded in the affirmative to a recent online survey asking if their alma mater should field a football team.
Speaking at the June meeting, Alumni Association President Lauren Conner ’79 urged the board to add the sport. “Alumni will finally have that homecoming long denied them,” she said. “The alumni board and the Alumni Association are poised to support this. Just give us a chance.”

Also at the meeting, ODU President Roseann Runte told the board, “I think we have shown over the years that Old Dominion is truly a great university that achieves what it sets out to do.” She emphasized that academic achievement and ethics would not be compromised if ODU were to adopt football.

The board’s vote comes with the caveats that financial and other criteria be met before a Monarch team can take the field. Pricewaterhouse-Coopers was retained in August to conduct a market assessment of the Hampton Roads area to measure the potential financial support for a football program. One provision of the ODU board’s vote on the football issue is a favorable market assessment. The firm has begun work to assess market support by surveying and interviewing university and Hampton Roads constituents. The PricewaterhouseCoopers study is expected to be completed by November and presented to the board at its December meeting.

Most recently, the firm completed market and financial analysis projects for the potential expansion of Wake Forest’s Groves Stadium, for the Uni-versity of Connecticut’s jump from I-AA to I-A in football and the reclassification of the Northern Kentucky University athletics program from Division II to Division I.

The final decision will hinge largely on commitments being in place by Dec. 1 of this year regarding the university’s ability to acquire the land necessary for football practice fields and facilities for new women’s sports, as well as on the receipt of pledges for an $8 million endowment by June 1, 2006. Another cost consideration entails the remodeling of Foreman Field, where the team would play its home games.

The preliminary financial plan proposed by the university calls for a $7 per-credit-hour increase in student fees, which would be phased in beginning in 2006. Old Dominion has based its plan on a five- or six-home game season and 6,000 tickets being sold per game, with single-game tickets priced at about $20. Students would be admitted free.

“The major issue is land,” athletic director Jim Jarrett said during a presentation to university administrators on Aug. 4. “We don’t have enough land now for our recreational sports programs, so this proposal would depend heavily on the city of Norfolk.”

At the same gathering, Runte spoke in favor of adding football, pending a positive report from the consultant. Noting that the university is becoming more of a residential institution, and could have up to 6,000 students living on campus in five to seven years, she said, “It would be nice for these students to be able to go to a football game on sunny fall Saturday afternoons. It would be part of the overall university experience.”

Should the university decide to adopt football, ODU would need to increase its number of women’s sports in accordance with NCAA Title IX guidelines. Some 90 participants and 63 scholarships would have to be added to women’s athletics, according to Jarrett, matching a like number of players and scholarships for a football program.

If football is approved, ODU would add women’s crew in 2007, women’s softball in 2009 and women’s volleyball in 2015, the athletic director said. And, says Runte, the university would add a marching band to its proposed budget.