Very interesting article. I like this Terry Holland guy, he reminds me a lot of our AD Bob Goin, who established a foundation at Cincinnati as soon as he got the job in order to make us attractive to major conferences (mainly the Big East and Big Ten). He is also using the football program to help schedule and improve the basketball program and make all the programs healthy. Goin did the same thing with UC in reverse fashion, UC basketball program to help the football program. The result is improved facilities, improved product on the football field and now a move to a conference that will allow the football program to help the athletic department, just like our basketball program has done. ECU is in good hands:
<a href='http://www.reflector.com/sports/content/sports/college/ecu/stories/2005/01/08/20050108GDRholland_sked.html;COXnetJSessionID=Bg2XMs7Tua0K23CvoaxhJIB4CNUNEALayd2zBqg0aMSpMc515ORk!-884607954?urac=n&urvf=11052293359640.28022219716415797' target='_blank'>Holland hopes scheduling will broaden ECU horizons</a>
By Nathan Summers, The Daily Reflector
Saturday, January 08, 2005
One thing that's going perfectly well for the East Carolina University football team is its relationships with other schools, something Athletic Director Terry Holland said is the cornerstone of who ECU's 20 sports programs play and will play down the road.
But as Holland grinds steadily toward his third major sports season at ECU, what he hopes will happen is a broadening of horizons, a much-needed branching out of some of those firmly rooted football ties into basketball, baseball and beyond. While there's not much room to bend the football schedule at present, Holland firmly believes the familiar non-conference opponents the last few years on the football docket are a strong ally in ECU's place in the NCAA future.
The former Virginia coach, AD and assistant to the president brought with him to Greenville a geographic game plan designed to embrace rivalries and guarantee strong competition and exposure. Holland's eight-school plan strives for a constant concentration on scheduling relationships with four in-state schools, two Virginia and two South Carolina mainstays.
The Pirates will tentatively play an 11-game football schedule again in 2005, unless ECU can nail down a 12th. Duke will visit Greenville, and the Pirates will travel to Wake Forest and to West Virginia for the second straight season.
"The schedules in football are made so far in advance that, for the next few years, we don't have much wiggle room unless that 12th game is approved," Holland said. "So what we've been trying to do is figure out where we would go and how we would approach things should be approved."
Holland said he hopes to keep the same mix in the future. But foremost in his plans is getting the same kind of structure elsewhere that the football team enjoys. To get it, the Pirates must win and Holland must concentrate on his vision of the big eight schools.
"We've pretty much said that our priority is the eight teams in our general area that play Div. I football, and try to establish across-the-board relationships with them in whatever way possible," Holland said. "Many of them we do have on the football schedule at some point in the future the two South Carolina schools in USC and Clemson. The others would be the four ACC schools in this state (Duke, N.C. State, UNC and Wake Forest) as well as the two in the state of Virginia Virginia Tech and Virginia."
In football, ECU travels to Raleigh to play the Wolfpack in 2007 and 2013, and host State in 2010 and 2016. The Pirates also have future football meetings scheduled with North Carolina (at Chapel HIll 2010, at ECU 2011) and Virginia Tech (at ECU 2008 and 2013, at Blacksburg 2012).
Holland said outside of the three-state nucleus, East Carolina will focus on its other big target the Big East and will attempt to maintain relations with West Virginia and Syracuse, and establish new ones with strong basketball ties, like Connecticut.
The notion of scheduling especially in trying to make basketball a priority is changing rapidly in Conference USA with the loss of banner hoops programs like Louisville and Cincinnati.
The loss of that exposure turns the pressure up a few more notches to hammer out a big non-conference slate.
For Holland, the plan right now is to use football as a model, but to concentrate the energy away from its flagship program.
"The non-conference schedule not only has to replace some of the high-profile opponents that we're losing from Conference USA, but also is important in terms of geography and in terms of rivalries that make sense for us," Holland said. "We'll be examining all of those, particularly those other than football. I think in football right now, the non-conference schedule is pretty darn good. We're playing the kind of people ACC teams and Big East teams that we should be playing."
A crucial factor for the men's basketball program is season ticket sales, which have been helped drastically in recent years with the lure of home dates with perennial basketball powers like Marquette, Louisville and Cincinnati. With much of that basketball identity being stripped away after this season, Holland said the toughest task will be matching that kind of exposure.
"I think we've seen what having prominent coaches and prominent teams coming in Conference USA has meant in terms of building our season ticket base for basketball, men's basketball in particular," Holland said. "But we're losing a lot of those prominent coaches and prominent teams. The big thing right now is how to parlay our current football relationships into deeper relationships so they can help the other sports."
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