(07-31-2021 10:25 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote: (07-31-2021 10:19 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote: (07-31-2021 09:42 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote: (07-31-2021 08:51 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote: My first duty assignment after graduating from Rice and becoming and officer and gentleman by act of congress was communications officer school in Newport, RI. I ended up renting a house with 4 other single junior officers. One of them had gone to the University of North Carolina, and had a fraternity brother whose father was a Yale graduate and crude oil trader in New York City. In that business he had dealt a lot with the Rockefellers, and somewhere along the way he had bought a vacation house from one of them on Cape Cod. We would go out there on weekends. The caretaker was a guy who was a tight end on the Yale football team who was being paid something like $5K/month to live in the house and keep someone from stealing it. That's how they do it.
$5K a month in 1969? That’s like $50K now.
Yep. And his job was basically to stay in a house that would probably have rented for something like $5K/week back then. Plus he had a grocery allowance.
I remember at the end of the 63-64 school year, I spoke to one of the football players who told me he had a summer job lined up making $5/hr, watching some dials. I was insanely jealous. I ended up working that summer in a sawmill for $1.25/hr.
Well, we certainly engaged in a bit of that, but not like the Ivies.
When people say that Rice should have an Ivy-League-type athletic program, I think they fail to understand that the typical Yale or Princeton alum is far more passionate about beating Harvard than the typical Rice alum ever was about beating Texas.
The other thing about the Ivies is that they pretty much all compete in a much larger number of women's and Olympic sports than Rice does. And they are passionate about winning them, too. When I took my women's rugby team to the Sweet-16 tournament, each school was assigned a team space for between matches. The tempo of a sevens tournament is that you play a 20-30 minute game in a 30-minute time slot, then have 2 hours or so off, then another 30-minute game slot, then another 2 hours off, then another 30-minute game slot, so there was considerable time between matches. Spaces were assigned alphabetically, so we were between Princeton and Stanford. Several of my girls had never been outside Texas, and were pretty wide-eyed about the whole thing. One of them came up to me and asked, "Is that THE Princeton?" Yes, I replied, it was.
And I mentioned previously about the Princeton alumni pregame tent for the women's 15s finals in Tampa.
If Rice were to have a true Ivy-League athletic program, we would probably have to add at least 10 sports for men and 10-15 for women, and to take every one of them more seriously than we currently take football. That's kind of what Hambone has alluded to several times, that maybe a way to build the athletic program would be to focus on women's and Olympic sports, build a reputation there, and then transfer that to the money men's sports. Harry Fouke did that at UH, building around a golf program, so it can be done. And the advantages would be that those sports are not expensive, do not require a large number of athletes, and typically involve true student-athletes who would bring up the athletic program's SAT/ACT scores, GPAs, and academic progress rates.