Soccer field press box continues strides

It's a sign of my advancing years, I guess, that I still consider soccer to be a "new" sport at UMM.

I remember soccer's first year when I took it upon myself to cover the team for the local print media. No one asked me to do it.

I remember sitting down with my spiral notebook and taking notes with the first coach, Chris (Christian) DeVries, a guy who frankly struck me as not very personable or ingratiating.

There was a learning process where I became familiar with the jargon and stat abbreviations. I boned up at least to the degree I could produce a passable journalistic product.

I imagine my writing could be looked up in "the archives," as they say. But this is print media stuff which is continually falling in our media hierarchy.

In the future we'll expect archived material to be online. Otherwise it might as well not even exist. So much for the 26 years I spent in the print media.

It's also a sign of my age that I remember vividly when the University of Minnesota-Morris had no real sports information department. It either didn't exist at all or existed in name only. This covered many years.

I'm not sharing this to sound negative but to show how much our world has changed.

Countless young people had a rich experience in UMM athletics when the sports information department was threadbare. Such an asset simply wasn't deemed a high priority.

Soccer began as a women's sport here. It came alive in that open space to the west of the P.E. Center.

We now have men's and women's teams and the growth isn't over. No college program is supposed to stand pat. There is a never-ending race to get more resources, more attention and a growing constituency.

I'm happy for any new amenity that UMM can obtain. What troubles me, though, is how some people describe these things as filling needs, as if we'd have some woeful deficit without them.

For much of my life UMM didn't even have a student center. Now we have a student center that is inaugurating a new coffee bar called "Higbie's."

How did past generations of UMM students get by without such amenities?
Looking macro, how could we even exist without such things as Smartphones and Ipads? Well we certainly did. And while we can view all the new stuff as helpful and enriching tools, I doubt we should look upon them as essentials.

Or am I just showing my age again?

The communications tech tools that have created a Jetsons-like universe around us, have made us feel we must, absolutely must carve out a niche for ourselves in the virtual world. This applies to institutions as well as individuals.
So it's no wonder that something as seemingly frivolous as a soccer "press box" is discussed in urgent terms now. It's something we "need." And excuse me, but I may have shown my age again with the "Jetsons" reference.

The current issue of the University Register proclaims that a press box is indeed becoming reality at UMM.

The whole point of this post I'm writing is irony - the irony of an institution that once had a nominal (if even that) sports information department now deeming it necessary to have a press box for an arguably obscure sport.

It's an amenity. It's something tangible. It's something UMM can boast about and rightfully so. But darn it, it's not "necessary."

Institutions make the "necessary" argument to get funding. All the more power to them if they succeed.

Frankly, I'm surprised UMM is making strides like this in a time when we hear a lot about retrenchment and restraint in the public sphere. We see headlines about how so many college graduates are finding it tough parlaying that degree into rewards in the outside world.

We see headlines about the apparently staggering debt many students acquire in getting those sheepskins. We hear how the debt might make future generations more skeptical about stepping on campus. But if UMM can get more funds for amenities, it must mean some influential people somewhere think colleges will keep attracting swarms of young people.

In the most parochial sense, we in Morris must be glad the expansion trends continue.

We learn from the Register article that the press box was "sold" not just for media purposes. The selling job has to cover as much ground as possible. The article by Zak Forde, a most enterprising young writer, explained that the press box serves as a shelter and storage facility right on site that will have safety advantages.

In other words, an injured player can be attended to in an optimal way rather than relying on the P.E. Center which of course is just a stone's throw away.

It reminds me of when Sam Schuman was arguing for the new football stadium and pointed out that the existing facilities had "no bathrooms."

Well. . . Porta-potties were of course there, and the P.E. Center right next to the field of course had ample facilities. How often do fans even feel "nature's call" during a game, and if they do, how could the porta-potties not fill the bill? They do for We-Fest.

But the selling job rolled on. It's a jungle out there with colleges competing to get "the most toys," but I had thought it slowed with our more austere times, you know, since 2008.

It looks as though the spigot is at least still partially on. I'm not sure we've seen the worst of the austere times yet.

Forde, who is assistant to the editor in chief - what a caddy-sounding title - reminds me of when I was his age and sitting at a typewriter. Like Forde, I sought to be quite descriptive and employed some of the techniques of fiction writing.

There was nothing fictional about the content, it's just that we paint pictures with our words, using embellishments that wouldn't be necessary to just report facts.

I take my hat off to Mr. Forde. He has some rough edges just like yours truly once did, perhaps trying too hard to be a "good writer" when occasionally we should take a deep breath and just insert a short, direct sentence. We need to pause to make sure we're getting to the point.

There is a fine line. We must constantly ask ourselves if we're getting off track with our flourishes.

Once the proper discipline is established, it's the epitome of good writing. My idol in this regard is Tony Horwitz. I would suggest that Mr. Forde obtain a book by the eminent non-fiction writer.

None of this is to suggest I have achieved perfection today. My formative years are behind me so you'll have to take what you get.

I cut my teeth when Woodward and Bernstein were doing their thing. So I developed cynical tendencies. If you want a better grasp of this mindset, check out the movie "Capricorn One."

We're told the new press box will be a recruiting tool. Forde quotes a coach saying we'll be able to recruit "quality student athletes." We wouldn't want low-quality student athletes, would we.

Forde writes about the "mere aesthetic appeal" of the new building - certainly better than looking at porta-potties, I guess.

The press box will afford the best in web-casting. What if a student from the 1980s stepped into a time machine, whizzed to the present and heard about "web-casting?"

But this is part of the new virtual fabric of how we define ourselves and make our stamp in the world.

Forde quotes a coach talking about the "key recruiting value brought when out-of-state students' families know they will be able to watch them play without having to spend considerable time and money coming to Minnesota repeatedly."

Of course we do want fans here. Morris has begun a concerted push to attract tourism. I imagine we don't really care about the tourists per se, we care about their money.

We had a tourist infusion here on Friday, 11/4, with the high school football playoff game between BOLD and Paynesville. It was at that still-new Big Cat Stadium which Schuman and others were successfully able to sell. The indoor bathrooms surely ensured that we have now joined civilization.

Further down the road for UMM: the renovation of "Louie's Lower Level."

I'm old enough to remember the original "Louie's Lower Level." I remember the original dean of UMM, Rodney Briggs, coming here once and saying this name had been stolen from another college. I wished he had finessed his story a little.

The beat goes on with infrastructure additions and improvements. That's all for the better as long as young people continue to view college as a good buy.

- Brian Williams - morris mn Minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com