BB: CCIW: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[Ralph Turner]

a glimpse of why to come in just a matter of time

Lee Driggers has accepted the position of head coach at East Texas Baptist University.

4 years of work and nothing but steps backward as far as the product on the field. I guess he got the field built but woop te doo.

From what Wheaton had to what he has attained this far, I would say "woop te doo", too.

I went to the Wheaton web site to look at the facilities that Wheaton has.

McCully is spectacular for football and track and field.

King Arena is one of the finest in the country for basketball, volleyball and wrestling.

I quote the website about Joe Bean Stadium.

The Wheaton College men's and women's soccer programs play their games in one of the finest facilities in all of NCAA Division III.

Here is what they say about Chrouser Natatorium.

In addition to providing recreation and fitness opportunities for Wheaton's students, faculty and staff, the Chrouser Natatorium is home to the competitive swim and water polo teams at the college, plus the local high school and USA Swimming Club programs.  It the annual site of the Wheaton Invitational for Swimming and Water Polo and the bi-annual site of the College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin Swimming Championships.

The natatorium houses a 61 foot wide by 110 foot long pool, with a flow-thru moveable divider which enables multiple configurations for programming.  The eight lane racing course can be set at 25 yards or 25 meters of total deep water for swimming or water polo competition.  The pool water is temperature and chlorine regulated by a computerized filter system, with rough water during competition being minimized by triple lane lines.

Tennis is workable with 6 lighted courts.

When Coach Driggers left McMurry for Wheaton, he was leaving a facility that has hosted the West Regionals on two separate occasions and going to essentially "nothing" by Wheaton standards.

With a Wheaton endowment of 6 times that of McMurry, he thought that he could begin to get baseball up to Wheaton standards. He has gotten the field turf this year, after 3 seasons of trying.

Please listen to this 2-minute video.

Next Wheaton needs seating, press box, dressing rooms and rest rooms!

Honestly, please grade Wheaton baseball facilities relative to the rest of the college.  What do you get, a C minus?  How many other CCIW baseball facilities are worse than Wheaton's and who are they? Getting to this point must have been like pulling eye teeth.

Coach Driggers has hosted a Regional, been the chair of the West Regional Evaluation committee, and won conference championships.  He has credentials.  The last time I spoke with family members in 2009 and then 2010, he was happy.

Maybe the next coach will get a more favorable reception or a more successful response of support from the Wheaton community.

[Gregory Sager]

Good rebuttal, Ralph.

[mr_b]

Good rebuttal, Ralph.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the original posting was in reference to the baseball field only, not the entirety of all the facilities recently built at the college.

[Ralph Turner]

Good rebuttal, Ralph.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the original posting was in reference to the baseball field only, not the entirety of all the facilities recently built at the college.

Thanks for the chance to clarify.

Yes, Wheaton has wonderful facilities, except for baseball.

Yes, there is a strong community pull for baseball players to attend Wheaton.  Can we call Wheaton the "Notre Dame" of evangelical universities?  (Just like North Park is the Notre Dame of Covenant congregations.  Or is that too far of a reach?    )  That alone will pull players.  The CCIW is a strong balanced conference.  It is tough to win there.

I did not want casual readers of the board to get the wrong impression of what Coach Driggers has done.

He built the field. Has he lost the momentum?  Is it time to get a new CEO of baseball on board now that he has gotten the turf?  That strategic decision may work for Wheaton.

He is going to a tough job at ETBU.  UT-Tyler "poaches" players from other ASC schools.  The ETBU field is better than Wheaton's, so that is one less thing that he needs to worry about.  With Centenary, McMurry and Texas Lutheran, which are 3 of the best 7, (and Schreiner) leaving the ASC, there is room for a program to develop.

[norfrank]

One, the rebuttal is talking about the facilities. All the facilities listed are on campus. Wheaton is land locked and has no room on campus for a baseball field.  The facilities they are currently using is being leased from the American Legion Hall. Wheaton basically sunk a boat load of money into a facility in which they have no financial interest.  I'd say that was pretty gracious. Driggers was brought in to help raise funds for a new field. Properties in Wheaton and the surrounding areas are quite expensive. Wheaton College has cut sports programs and athletic department programs. There was no way they were going to buy property and build a new stadium without outside donors committing the money. Doesn't seem that anyone won a lottery again that would allow them to contribute to the stadium.

I think the biggest concern as pointed out in the previous posts was the decline on the field not the field itself. The team had talent. Two all-americans, another all region and another all conference on this year's team. Yet, they failed to make the playoffs. Injuries were not to blame. The team went from conference playoffs in 2008 (year before Driggers), conference championship game (with Bobby Elder's players) to missing the playoffs for three straight years. Why?

[mr_b]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the original posting was in reference to the baseball field only, not the entirety of all the facilities recently built at the college.

Thanks for the chance to clarify.

Yes, Wheaton has wonderful facilities, except for baseball.

Yes, there is a strong community pull for baseball players to attend Wheaton.  Can we call Wheaton the "Notre Dame" of evangelical universities?  (Just like North Park is the Notre Dame of Covenant congregations.  Or is that too far of a reach?    )  That alone will pull players.  The CCIW is a strong balanced conference.  It is tough to win there.

I did not want casual readers of the board to get the wrong impression of what Coach Driggers has done.

He built the field. Has he lost the momentum?  Is it time to get a new CEO of baseball on board now that he has gotten the turf?  That strategic decision may work for Wheaton.

He is going to a tough job at ETBU.  UT-Tyler "poaches" players from other ASC schools.  The ETBU field is better than Wheaton's, so that is one less thing that he needs to worry about.  With Centenary, McMurry and Texas Lutheran, which are 3 of the best 7, (and Schreiner) leaving the ASC, there is room for a program to develop.

Thanks for the clarification. 

[mr_b]

One, the rebuttal is talking about the facilities. All the facilities listed are on campus. Wheaton is land locked and has no room on campus for a baseball field. 

Consider how North Park has shoe-horned a four-sport facility into an urban setting.  And then we still have to listen to gripes about a short right-field porch!   

[Ralph Turner]

One, the rebuttal is talking about the facilities. All the facilities listed are on campus. Wheaton is land locked and has no room on campus for a baseball field. 

Consider how North Park has shoe-horned a four-sport facility into an urban setting.  And then we still have to listen to gripes about a short right-field porch!   

Yes.  Thanks for bringing that up.  (I have been on the North Park campus.     )

[norfrank]

The football field at Wheaton would not be real conducive to adding a diamond. They do not have the excess space in the same format that North Park does. IE, there isn't a lot of additional space outside of the sidelines on the football field. The dimensions would be worse than North Park.

[Gregory Sager]

Good rebuttal, Ralph.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the original posting was in reference to the baseball field only, not the entirety of all the facilities recently built at the college.

Thanks for the chance to clarify.

Yes, Wheaton has wonderful facilities, except for baseball.

Speaking as someone who is very familiar with Wheaton's sports facilities, I'd say that you're guilty of grade inflation in giving Wheaton's baseball field a C- in comparison to its other sports facilities, Ralph. Admittedly, I haven't seen the new turf field yet, though; still, it's docked a few points compared to the rest of Wheaton's facilities simply because, if nothing else, it's not on campus. Heck, it's not even in the same town as the college.

Yes, there is a strong community pull for baseball players to attend Wheaton.  Can we call Wheaton the "Notre Dame" of evangelical universities?

Blecch. Well, at least it's better than calling it "the Harvard of evangelical universities," a phrase I've heard from more than one Wheatie. (Incidentally, Jerry Falwell was on record as saying that he wanted Liberty to become the Notre Dame of evangelical universities. I think that he had sports in mind as much as anything else when he said that, and in that department, if nothing else, the fact that Liberty is D1 may make it more of a parallel to Notre Dame among evangelicals in that regard.)

(Just like North Park is the Notre Dame of Covenant congregations.  Or is that too far of a reach?    )

Since we're the only Covenant school that there is, that makes us the Notre Dame, the Harvard, the Wheaton, the Liberty, the Bluffton, and the UMPI of Covenant universities.

That alone will pull players.  The CCIW is a strong balanced conference.  It is tough to win there.

True. But each year Wheaton typically finishes in the top half of the CCIW in just about every sport, and over the years baseball has been a glaring exception to this. Given the school's plentiful resources and its national reputation, there's no reason why Wheaton shouldn't be doing better in baseball, even if it doesn't win as consistently as it does in soccer, football, and basketball. The lack of an on-campus baseball field certainly doesn't help, but if the upgrades that Driggers got are as impressive as they're supposed to be once they're finished, that should mitigate the off-campus problem somewhat.

I did not want casual readers of the board to get the wrong impression of what Coach Driggers has done.

He built the field. Has he lost the momentum?  Is it time to get a new CEO of baseball on board now that he has gotten the turf?  That strategic decision may work for Wheaton.

This makes it sound as though he was pushed out the door by Wheaton, Ralph. Did he not resign of his own accord -- because, presumably, his kid had graduated?

He is going to a tough job at ETBU.  UT-Tyler "poaches" players from other ASC schools.  The ETBU field is better than Wheaton's, so that is one less thing that he needs to worry about.  With Centenary, McMurry and Texas Lutheran, which are 3 of the best 7, (and Schreiner) leaving the ASC, there is room for a program to develop.

One thing that I never envied about your soon-to-be-ex-conference, Ralph, is the fact that it's a public/private mix. I see all kinds of problems with making a mixed league work, and you've just spelled out one of them.

[Ralph Turner]

The football field at Wheaton would not be real conducive to adding a diamond. They do not have the excess space in the same format that North Park does. IE, there isn't a lot of additional space outside of the sidelines on the football field. The dimensions would be worse than North Park.

Can we say LA Coliseum?   

[Gregory Sager]

One, the rebuttal is talking about the facilities. All the facilities listed are on campus. Wheaton is land locked and has no room on campus for a baseball field. 

Consider how North Park has shoe-horned a four-sport facility into an urban setting.  And then we still have to listen to gripes about a short right-field porch!   

Don't sell us short, DB. We shoehorn five sports into Holmgren (men's soccer, football, baseball, women's soccer, and softball), not four.

One, the rebuttal is talking about the facilities. All the facilities listed are on campus. Wheaton is land locked and has no room on campus for a baseball field.  The facilities they are currently using is being leased from the American Legion Hall. Wheaton basically sunk a boat load of money into a facility in which they have no financial interest.  I'd say that was pretty gracious. Driggers was brought in to help raise funds for a new field. Properties in Wheaton and the surrounding areas are quite expensive. Wheaton College has cut sports programs and athletic department programs. There was no way they were going to buy property and build a new stadium without outside donors committing the money. Doesn't seem that anyone won a lottery again that would allow them to contribute to the stadium.

File under: Cry Me A River. Wheaton has an endowment that is half again as large as that of the next-wealthiest school in the CCIW, Illinois Wesleyan, and which is over four times larger than the endowments of conference paupers NPU and Carthage. Properties in Wheaton and the surrounding area are quite expensive, you say? Ever priced any property on the North Side of Chicago? The fact that Driggers -- who was not a Wheaton guy and who thus didn't have the in-house contacts that a Wheaton alumnus would have for fundraising -- went out and raised the money to upgrade what is now Pfund Stadium is impressive. It speaks not only to his own abilities and to the willingness of people to contribute to the school, but also to the sheer volume of deep pockets that he was able to reach. Don't think for a moment that this potential donor pool is paralleled anywhere else within the CCIW, because it isn't.

At North Park, teams wait their turn to practice at Holmgren every day, because three teams share the facility in the fall and two share it in the spring. The baseball team not only has to do field maintenance before and after each practice and each game, it has to set up and take down the left-field fence, which cuts across the softball diamond. The two soccer teams have to set up and take down their nets before each practice and game because of football, and football has to get the tackling dummies out of the way after each practice. Holmgren is not a selling point for potential recruits, unless they or their parents are impressed by a school's ability to multitask within limited space.

Oh, and by the way, NPU does not own the land upon which Holmgren Athletic Complex sits. It's held under a long-term lease from the Water Reclamation District, just as Wheaton leases Pfund Stadium from the Carol Stream American Legion. So, when Holmgren was upgraded a decade ago, NPU sunk a bunch of its money into a facility in which it has no financial interest.

If you're looking for sympathy for Wheaton's baseball field problems, you're barking up the wrong tree as far as NPU fans are concerned.

[Ralph Turner]

I don't know the terms of his leaving.  He is an honorable man, a "hand-shake" kind of honorable, and a mutual agreement may have been reached that meets the needs of both.

The Wheaton family may have identified a younger man.  There may be other issues about which I can only speculate, and I do not wish to do that.

He was sincere in that video. I am happy for that success.

As for "being in a different city", there are several arrangements among schools and non-school facilities in D3, e.g. Chapman and Shenandoah. I would expect Wheaton could make it work somewhere.   

[mr_b]

At North Park, teams wait their turn to practice at Holmgren every day, because three teams share the facility in the fall and two share it in the spring. The baseball team not only has to do field maintenance before and after each practice and each game, it has to set up and take down the left-field fence, which cuts across the softball diamond.

For fall baseball, the practices are usually scheduled to start as soon as the football or soccer team clears the field.  That can sometimes cut into our practice time.  I'm sure the softball team faces the same challenges.

[norfrank]

Mr. Sager, not looking for sympathy in any way. I know the main donor was not part of the "Wheaton" family. Yes he was able to poke into deep pockets. Don't forget there are many players that have parents with deep pockets. I merely was pointing out that Wheaton was not going to buy any property and by the way there really is not property around Wheaton College to by anyway. Just like there is no property to buy around North Park.

My points about property, field and team performance are made merely to point out that Mr. Driggers was not the "savior" many thought he was going to be. The field may have improved but the team performance digressed. The next sign he gives from third base will be exceed the total he gave over the four years at Wheaton.